Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron has given numerous speeches at convocations, events and forums. But last night in the Grant Recital Hall, the music professor sang a different tune - literally. Bergeron was one of eight musicians who performed the music of Richard Felciano in an event supported by the Department of Music and the Multimedia and Electronic Music Experiments program.
Felciano, professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, composed the pieces, which meld technology - or "live electronics," as the program called it - with instrumental and vocal music. Bergeron's performance, called "Responsory," was a chant in which the dean sang solo into a microphone that then created a feedback echo for her song, making the dean's voice her own back-up chorus.
Bergeron, who has performed music since her college days, said she only recently began singing seriously. Performing music is a completely different experience from giving a speech to an audience, Bergeron told The Herald. "When you're speaking, in public, you're trying to reach them with rhetoric, and when you're performing music you're trying to reach them with time," she said. "I actually feel very different when I perform in front of an audience," she added. "In fact I don't think very much about the audience."
She said she has known Felciano since they were colleagues at Berkeley. She has a special connection with Felciano, she said, because the piece she performed was a Gregorian chant he wrote, and she has been involved in these chants in her scholarly work.
David Walker '11, who is in a MEME ensemble, said he appreciated the way the piece incorporated live music with electronics. He added that it was a new experience to see Bergeron in a musical role. "I've never really seen her perform before, but I know she's a performer," he said. Bergeron's performance "was actually my favorite piece," he added. He noted that he especially enjoyed "the interplay between the live feedback and her performance."
The composer himself, who arrived on campus Sunday to work with the performers in their final rehearsals, was there to watch the fruits of his labors. He told The Herald he was not disappointed. "The performance was wonderful.," Felciano said. "I mean, they're great musicians and they understood the music - that's not music a lot of people can just immediately walk into."
