The Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra will perform the world premiere of "Frog's Eye" by Professor of Music Evan Ziporyn on Saturday, Oct. 12 at 7:30 p.m. at Dorchester's Strand Theater and Sunday, Oct. 13 at 3 p.m. at Harvard University's Sanders Theater. Tickets for the Strand concert are available in advance for $10, $19, $29 and $42 with discounts for seniors and students; the Sanders tickets range from $9-$42. For more information, call Pro Arte at (617) 661-7067.
Discussing his inspiration for the piece, Ziporyn describes a frog sitting almost entirely immersed in water. "Perfect stillness, perfect contemplation, patience, serenity, all that good Zen stuff ... [but] they are in fact hard at work, staring intently, waiting for a moment of action and violence, for insects, for food." Humans, in contrast, "strive for a certain type of awareness, for multilayered perception, and occasionally we get there," he says, "but we seem to be built for subjective narrative. We've got to catch the fly to survive."
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 9, 2002.
