A Peek Behind the Curtain: A Chat with Russell Buonasera, Zilkha Hall Technical Director

Russell Buonasera

One of the key players who helps make Musiqa performances such a success when it performs at The Hobby Center is Russell Buonasera, Zilkha Hall’s warm-hearted and capable Technical Director. 


Buonasera wants to build the next generation of arts and education enthusiasts. Throughout his school years, he held an undying appreciation of the arts and arts education. When his junior high English teacher took notice of his immense appreciation for Shakespeare and theater, she sent him to speak with the school’s theater director, who opened his eyes to the beauty of the performance of Shakespeare.

The efforts his teachers took in encouraging his interest in the arts has remained with him throughout his life. “When you have these doors opened to you and realize people are paying attention to what a kid is doing meant a lot to me,” Buonasera said.

 
Buonasera began his career as an actor, but soon realized the personal reward of being part of the backstage production, instead of the focus of the production.  This interest led to various positions as a production technician, sound engineer, and carpenter. While taking a required Stagecraft class for his undergraduate theatre degree at the University of Houston-Central in the early ‘80s, Buonasera was encouraged to talk to the Scene Shop Foreman about an opening as a Scenic Carpenter for the Festivals Company. 

The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts

“The Festivals Company was the professional project of U of H that produced the three Children’s Theatre Festival shows at the Wortham Theatre on campus, and the two Shakespeare Festival shows at Miller Outdoor Theatre, under the direction of the late Dr. Sidney Berger,” Buonasera said.

 
He decided to take the job.  By gaining experience as Scenic Carpenter, he was able to find continuing work on the technical side of live event production, working in a wide range of venues including: Windmill Dinner Theater, Stages Repertory Theatre, The Shaw Festival at U of H/Clear Lake, Miller Outdoor Theatre, Local 51 of IATSE, the Tower Theater, Texas Opera Theatre, The Virginia Opera, and Houston Community College/Central.


In January 2003, a few months after Zilkha Hall opened, Buonasera joined the Hobby Center and learned about the Discovery Series.  The Series’ programs serve K-12 students from economically disadvantaged areas of Houston; thanks to the generosity of donors, students attend the performances at no cost.

Zilkha Hall

 
Musiqa’s award-winning educational concert, Around the World with Musiqa, has been a part of the Discovery Series since its debut.  With performances for schools every October, Around the World with Musiqa is an interactive concert experience for schoolchildren, created by the composers of Musiqa.  Presented in Zilkha Hall, the concert uses new interpretations of well-known folk songs to teach musical concepts to students in a fun and engaging musical experience.  Encouraging arts education and broadening culture through community outreach programs is vital to the Hobby Center Foundation’s mission.

 
“The programs are the best tools for engaging younger children in dissembling the art of performance and reassembling that makes it accessible to children of all ages,” Buonasera said.

 
As a technical director, Buonasera’s roles include sound design, a collection of resources and personnel that mount the production, safety, functional hardware, and securing the amount of time needed on stage to execute said duties.

 
Buonasera most closely collaborates with Musiqa Artistic Director Anthony Brandt. “I would say the biggest moderator is Anthony. He and Karol Bennett have been the constant support,” Buonasera said.


“Tony has a real sense of exploration and engagement with everything in the world,” Buonasera said.

 
Buonasera provides the primary support and framework for the performers and artistic staff. He said the biggest issue in production is time management because it’s the most finite component of any production. Buonasera stays mostly behind the scenes; however, at the end of every performance, the on-stage performers introduce the production staff as ‘the men and women behind the curtains.’


“They describe details like what the stage hand does or sound engineer functions,” Buonasera explained. “The performers deconstruct the support for production. That’s my way of engaging the kids, as well as being very hands on with the lobby traffic full of kids.”

 
“Around the World with Musiqa is so well crafted and impactful, which gives us even more dedication to keep it going,” Buonasera said of the Hobby’s Center’s commitment to presenting music education activities for children.

Musiqa’s 2013 programming during the Hobby Center’s Discovery Series offers school day performances of Around the World with Musiqa, October 22-25, 2013 at 9:30 a.m. and 11:15 a.m.  Musiqa’s concert for children grades 4-7, Musiqa ReMix, will take place December 10-11, 2013 at 9:30 a.m. and 11:15 a.m.  

Both Around the World with Musiqa and Musiqa ReMix include a pre-concert in-school workshop, a CD for every classroom, online teacher materials and the downtown performance.  Musiqa’s education programs have served close to 35,000 students in the greater Houston area, with a focus on reaching Title I Qualified schools.

To register and learn more about these exciting programs, please visit www.musiqaloveskids.org 

We hope to see you at the upcoming performance!

Rob Smith on Time Travel

Rob Smith

 

 

 

Musiqa's Artistic Board Member Rob Smith took some time to discuss Time Travel, Musiqa's season opener. Each concert of Musiqa's 2013-14 Season features new works that explore the concept of time. Each composer was carefully selected to fulfill Musiqa's goal of bringing the best of contemporary classical music to Houston audiences. Smith's new work, "Dance Music," is inspired by the pop and jazz music of the 1970s. 

 

 

"For this program [Time Travel] we are presenting two of our most important living composers - Louis Andriessen and John Corigliano; three younger composers who are attracting significant notice: Michael van der Aa, Missy Mazzoi and Bill Ryan; and myself," Smith said.

 

Louis Andiessen's "Hout (Wood) and Bill Ryan's "Blurred" are intended to alter our perception of time. "In "Hout," everyone performs the same melodic line in strict canons that are extremely close together, but are asked to play loosely together, thus creating a "blurred" sensation," Smith explained.

In Missy Mazzoli's "Magic With Everyday Objects," everyday musical elements that have been made familiar through their use in previous music are combined to find "beauty and rapture in the midst of chaos." Folk texts by William Butler Yeats and Padraic Colum are given a modern interpretation in John Corigliano's "Three Irish Folksongs."


Michael van der Aa's "And how are we today?" uses a text by Carol Ann Duffy, which views the world from the vantage point of someone who is manic and perceiving time at a different rate from the rest of us.


"Each of the works on this program either travels back in time to borrow ideas from other time periods, or directly effects the listener's perception of moving through time," Smith said.


Time Travel presents Musiqa's most unique concert experience, as it will be outdoors and follow the presentation of visual artist Jo Ann Fleischhauer's new multi-media art installation in the Market Square Clock Tower. Time Travel also features a number of works that are heavily influenced by popular styles, and includes some instruments that Musiqa doesn't often feature: electric guitar, double bass, trumpets and trombones.


Join us this Saturday, Sept. 28, to experience Musiqa's most innovative concert yet! We encourage you to bring blankets and chairs. 



What Time Is It? is organized by Blaffer Art Museum and Houston Arts Alliance.  Major support comes from the Houston Downtown Management District and the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.  Community partners include Houston Parks and Recreation Department, the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston and the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.  The exhibition is on view 24 hours-a-day (music component audible daily 7 a.m. to midnight) on the corner of Travis and Congress Streets at Market Square from September 28, 2013 through March 29, 2014.

Written by Mia M. Smith

Musiqa's Artistic Director Anthony Brandt Gives New Music a New Venue

Anthony Brandt

 

With the goal of taking contemporary classical music outside of the concert hall, Musiqa Artistic Director Anthony Brandt has collaborated with composer Chapman Welch and visual artist Jo Ann Fleischhauer to create the public art installation 'What Time Is It?' Musiqa offers this collaborative effort to present a musical performance exploring the concept of time.

 

 

Brandt welcomed Fleischhauer’s approach about collaborating on an installation that would transform the clock tower in Market Square—Houston’s oldest plaza. Now that we all have wrist-watches and smartphones, the role of a clock tower has changed. Without the need for a bell to signify alarms or specific hours of the day, Fleischhauer, Brandt and Welch have transformed the Louis and Annie Friedman Clock Tower into an installation that merges art and music. The installation opens on September 28^th and will be on display until late March 2014.

 

"I don't often get a chance to write a piece where people will be exposed to it for six months,” Brandt said. “It is a unique and exciting challenge.”

 

 

Brandt and Chapman’s solution is to tell time by musical means rather than by counting tolls.  There are twelve Major chords in the Western musical system, just as there are twelve hours on the face of a clock.  At the top of each hour, one of a fixed series of chords will sound for two minutes; over the course of the day, the chords rise and fall with the sun, so that someone who frequents the square will gradually be able to tell time by listening to the chord. The title “C O’Clock” refers to the fact that a C-Major chord sounds at noon and midnight.

 

 

Tommy Gregory from Houston Arts Alliance

On top of those chords, Brandt and Welch have designed a computer program that improvises ringing sounds, evocative of the original bell. The computer chooses from twelve possible “scores:” the scores are rough guides and give the computer a lot of leeway, so that no hour will sound the same and no two days will be alike.

 

 

 

 

Brandt and Welch were very conscious that their music is a “guest” in the Square: their goal is to create an experience that is fresh and attractive, giving listeners something engaging to experience but also capable of comfortably lying in the background.

 

 

HAA's Tommy Gregory Installing Fleischhauer's Art Piece

 

 

As a part of the 6-month installation, Musiqa has also commissioned six student composers to compose works for brass instruments that will be premiered from inside the tower. Student performers from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and University of Houston’s Moores School of Music will perform monthly from the tower. The student composers will play once each month, beginning with a solo on Oct. 25 at 12:15pm. The next month will transition the performance to a duo, and the following month will include a performance by a trio. By the sixth month, a sextet will conclude the performances.

 

 

 

“We wanted to create something beautiful in the neighborhood for people to look forward to,” Brandt said. “A historic presence will take on new life."

 

 

To hear the 17-hour sounds of Market Square, join us on Sept. 28 at 7:30pm in Market Square park for the premiere of Time Travel!

What Time Is It? is organized by Blaffer Art Museum and Houston Arts Alliance.  Major support comes from the Houston Downtown Management District and the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.  Community partners include Houston Parks and Recreation Department, the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston and the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.  The exhibition is on view 24 hours-a-day (music component audible daily 7 a.m. to midnight) on the corner of Travis and Congress Streets at Market Square from September 28, 2013 through March 29, 2014.

Chapman Welch Adds an Electronic Twist to Time Travel

Musiqa’s Season Opener, Time Travel, will kick-off the outdoor artistic installation What Time Is It?, a collaborative public art installation piece featuring the work of visual artist Jo Ann Fleischhauer and compositions by composers Anthony Brandt and Chapman Welch.  The concert opens with the first “tolling” of the musical installation and the lighting of the historic Market Square Clock Tower.

Musiqa’s collaboration addresses the auditory nature of the clock tower by replacing the scheduled chimes of bells with original musical works inspired by the site. C O’Clock, composed by Musiqa's Artistic Director Anthony Brandt and Chapmen Welch, will run through the entire duration of the exhibition by replacing the ringing of the bell with a progression of chords that rise and set like the sun.  Welch and Brandt each contribute a different musical perspective on the concept of time in C O’Clock: Brandt will ‘tell time’ in a musical fashion, and Welch will use a computer software called Max/MSP, which allows the computer to improvise on top of the chords. There will be a progression of chords each hour. As the chords rise and fall, they will eventually be recognized as a specific time of day.

With a background in electronic music and music composition, Welch created the electronic aspect to C O’Clock with an innovative process using computer technology and real sounds from the streets of Market Square in downtown Houston.  During the creation process, he visited Market Square during the morning, noon, and night hours to record various sounds including traffic and birds chirping.

Composer Chapman Welch

Using Market Square as the sound source to compose a piece for C O’Clock, Welch ultimately created a progression of chords that will in turn serve as a replacement for the tolling of the clock. As the tolling begins on Sept. 28, 2013, audiences will begin to recognize the chords in relation to the various times they were made to illustrate. At noon, the highest chord is heard, and the lowest chord, which is barely audible, plays at midnight.
“Every hour, one minute before the hour and one minute after the hour, the clock will ring,” Welch explained, “The computer takes the morning, noon or night, depending on the time of day, and tunes the sounds of Market Square to sound like the tolling of bells.”

As Welch calls it, ‘tolling’ is the electronic sound that the computer will improvise. There will be a combination of repeating cycles, each lasting between 1 to 3 minutes. The ‘tolling’ coincides with the recurring theme of What Time Is It? : showcasing the changing nature of time in the modern era.

“There’s a certain connection people make to a bell,” Welch said. “They imagine someone ringing it, so what we [Welch and Brandt] are doing is reminiscent of a bell.”

Welch created 12 different types of improvisations for the computer to follow. “The computer has certain rules and improvises on top of the chord,” he said. “There are certain rhythms it [computer] could possibly play. We know what’s going to happen, but not exactly when it will happen.”

With C O’Clock, Welch and Brandt want to explore the concept of time in an artistic and musical way. They composed 12 movements to be improvised with particular rules.

“The combination of chords every hour coupled with the computer improvising every hour is C O’ clock,” Welch said. “No acoustic instruments are used. The chords aren’t generated from synthetic sound, but the sounds of Market Square.”

Musiqa’s Season Opener Time Travel premieres on September 28, 2013, at 7:30pm in Market Square. Stay tuned for more exciting details on Time Travel!

What Time Is It? is organized by Blaffer Art Museum and Houston Arts Alliance.  Major support comes from the Houston Downtown Management District and the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.  Community partners include Houston Parks and Recreation Department, the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston and the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.  The exhibition is on view 24 hours-a-day (music component audible daily 7 a.m. to midnight) on the corner of Travis and Congress Streets at Market Square from September 28, 2013 through March 29, 2014.

Meet Jo Ann Fleischhauer

Musiqa is delighted to be a part of What Time Is It?, a public art installation at the Louis and Annie Friedman Clock Tower, also known as the Market Square Clock Tower, in downtown Houston’s Historic District.  Marking Musiqa’s first-ever collaboration on an outdoor artistic installation, What Time Is It? explores the concept of time and the relevancy of its physical markers in a digital age, using visual arts and music to interrogate the place of a clock tower in our everyday lives.  Organized by the Houston Arts Alliance and the Blaffer Art Museum, What Time Is It? features the work of visual artist Jo Ann Fleischhauer and music by Musiqa Artistic Director Anthony Brandt and Houston composer Chapman Welch.   Musiqa’s Season Opener, Time Travel will kick-off the installation as the concert opens with the first “tolling” of the musical installation and the lighting of the tower.

Artwork by Jo Ann Fleischhauer

Fleischhauer and Brandt share a mutual fascination in the intersection of their respective arts, along with an interest in the way the arts intersect with other fields.  The recipient of two Individual Artist Fellowship Grants from the Houston Arts Alliance, a Houston Endowment Grant, a City of Houston's City Initiative Grant as well as grants from Connemara Conservancy, Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, Buffalo Bayou Artpark, Tacoma Contemporary, and Project Row Houses, Fleischhauer is a multi-media sculptor and installation artist who lives in Houston.  After meeting several years ago during an arts interview, Fleischhauer and Brandt discovered they were both exploring artistic connections to nanotechnology: Fleischhauer was an artist-in-residence at the Department of Nanomedicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, integrating science and art through nano research. Meanwhile, Brandt was composing Nano Symphony, a celebratory piece to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the Buckyball by Rick Smalley, Robert Curl and Harold Kroto, who shared the Nobel Prize award in Chemistry for the discovery of a new form of carbon, buckminsterfullerene ("buckyballs"). 

Artist Jo Ann Fleischhauer

With an additional interest in art and architecture, after concluding her residency at UT, Fleischhauer began searching for inspiration for a new project by exploring Houston architecture. “I use unintended art spaces as the physical and conceptual infrastructures for the project installations. I respond to the architecture by integrating and layering historical aspects of the spaces and locations with their connections to the present," she said.

The Market Square Clock Tower was originally built more than a century ago for Houston’s City Hall.  After the old City Hall was destroyed, the clock was placed in storage and eventually ended up in a junkyard.  Ultimately saved from destruction, a new tower was constructed to house the clock, and the clock was brought to its new home in Market Square in 1996.

Fascinated by the history of the Market Square Clock Tower, Fleischhauer decided to take a closer look at the clock tower's relevancy from both a historic and modern day perspective. 

 "Historically, the clock tower was used for telling and tolling time, emergency warnings and calling the community to church," Fleischhauer explained.

Artwork by Jo Ann Fleischhauer

Fleischhauer and Brandt began to brainstorm about the potential of creating an installation centered on the lost purpose of the clock tower.

“I wanted to transform the physical clock tower by making it disappear,” Fleischhauer explained. “I played with that idea by lining the inside columns with mirrors."

The mirrors will reflect off of each other to make half of the clock tower visually disappear as an expression of Fleischhauer's exploration of the relevance of the clock tower. During the night each clock face will project an image, created and printed by Fleischhauer, expressing different visual perceptions of time. 

 "One clock face has notes that Galileo took while observing Jupiter," she said.

She will also explore the concept of our 'interior time,' including vital functions like a heartbeat or pulse. The images she used for this concept build on an experiment that began in 1977 aboard The Voyager. Sounds and photographs were recorded to attempt to communicate with extra-terrestrials. Currently, the Voyager is about to leave our solar system. “The heartbeat and brain waves of a woman who worked on the project were recorded on a Golden Record," Fleischhauer explained. "Her brain waves and vital signs could have indicated something specific, for example, our interior feelings and how they are registered."

When Fleischhauer first approached Brandt about concealing the clock tower within an art installation, she considered the idea of a bell that no longer rings.  Surrounded by the church bells of the Episcopal Church as a child, Fleischhauer wanted to recreate the experience of connecting sound with time, transforming the area around the Market Square clock into a performance space. 

Artwork by Jo Ann Fleischhauer

"I thought about Tony [Brandt] composing a piece using the clock tower bell," Fleischhauer said. "And using the bell as a way of NOT telling time, but as a musical component. Even if people didn’t use the clock tower to tell time, would it disrupt their everyday perceptions if it didn't ring at the “correct time?”

Fleischhauer also installed a spiral staircase that leads up to the clock tower's bell.  Throughout the exhibit, student composers from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and University of Houston’s Moores School of Music will perform monthly from the tower in a musical expression that places music once again within the clock tower. 

The installation runs through March 28.  In addition to the ongoing musical installation, throughout the 6-month period, Musiqa will present the world premieres of ten new works.

As part of the initial celebration, Houston Downtown Management District launches its fall season of Market Square Park concerts by inviting Musiqa to present TimeTravel.  Featuring some of Houston's finest performers, the program includes exciting works by Louis Andriessen, Michael van der Aa, John Corigliano--all winners of classical composition's highest honor, the Grawemeyer Award--as well as "Dance Mix" by Musiqa's own Rob Smith.    The concert opens with the first "tolling" of the musical installation and the lighting of the tower."

Stay tuned to the Musiqa blog to learn more about this exciting project as we share how Musiqa Artistic Director Anthony Brandt and sound designer/composer Chapman Welch collaborated on What Time Is It? to explore the connection of sound and time within the modern world. 

Time Travel is made possible by the generous support of Houston Downtown Management District.   What Time Is It? is organized by Blaffer Art Museum and Houston Arts Alliance.  Major support comes from the Houston Downtown Management District and the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.  Community partners include Houston Parks and Recreation Department, the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston and the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.  The exhibition is on view 24 hours-a-day (music component audible daily 7 a.m. to midnight) on the corner of Travis and Congress Streets at Market Square from September 28, 2013 through March 29, 2014.