The Council for the Arts at MIT's 25th anniversary gala made quite a splash on the Boston social scene. The Boston Globe led its October 27 "Party Lines" column with a report -- with several photographs -- on the Council's Silver Anniversary Ball at the Museum of Fine Arts. "Could there be a more elegant place to dine in this city than under several Velasquezes in the Koch Gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts while listening to Kitty Carlisle Hart sing Cole Porter?" asked writer Julie Hatfield.
Boston Musica Viva will present the world premiere of Associate Professor Evan Ziporyn's Dreams of a Dominant Culture at its concert titled "Re-Imagined Places" on Friday, Nov. 14 at 8pm at the Longy School of Music's Edward Pickman Concert Hall in Cambridge. Dreams of a Dominant Culture takes its inspiration from the Gadhon chamber tradition of central Javanese court gamelan, consisting of various types of intricate and virtuosic heterophony, performed in an unobtrusive and non-soloistic manner.
"An audience member -- particularly a westerner -- can feel like the fortunate witness to a highly refined communal mediation, rather than the recipient of a directed communiqu��� from a group of performers," said Professor Ziporyn. A pre-concert event at 7pm will feature The G'nder Club -- Professor Ziporyn and Erin McCoy '95 -- performing Gamelan Gender Wayang, the music used to accompany shadow puppet plays. Professor Ziporyn will also discuss the connection between Javanese Gamelan music, Claude Debussy and Dreams of a Dominant Culture.
Boston Musica Viva is offering a special discount ticket price of $7 to members of the MIT community. For more information, call 354-6910.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on November 5, 1997.
