Professional Musicians Present Master Class at UNO
A pair of professional musicians on a national tour visited the University of New Orleans to present a master class to students in the music department. Pianist and composer Eric Wubbels and cellist and composer Jessie Marino played examples of their work, offered explanations about their music and answered questions from students who packed a third floor classroom in the Performing Arts Center. Wubbels and Marino attended the class at the invitation of their friend Yotam Haber, a visiting assistant professor of music at UNO.
According to Haber, Wubbels and Marino represent the new paradigm in music, where individuals are both composers and performers and no longer one or the other.
Wubbels and Marino are in the middle of a six-city tour that started in Charlottesville, Va. and will end in Berkeley, Calif. They are performing with American acoustic magician Alvin Lucier and Austrian visual/sound artist Peter Ablinger. Each piece plays with its own acoustic phenomenon, tricking and guiding the listening experience while reawakening the ear's attention to the space around it.
Wubbels is a composer, pianist and executive director of the Wet Ink Ensemble in New York, NY. His music has been performed throughout Europe, Asia and the United States. As a performer, he has given American and world premieres of works by major figures such as Richard Barrett, Michael Finnissy, Beat Furrer, George Lewis and Mathias Spahlinger.
Marino is a composer and performer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is working toward her Doctor of Musical Arts in composition at Stanford University. She is founder of the sound-centric performance duo On Structure and co-artistic director of the electro-acoustical outfit Ensemble Pamplemousse. As a cellist, Marino is a performing member of Ensemble Pamplemousse and the Wet Ink Ensemble.
Yotam Haber is the newest member of the UNO music faculty. The former Guggenheim fellow and 2007 Rome Prize winner in music composition is teaching applied composition, theory and a seminar called "Music and Monumentality" during the fall 2013 semester. Haber was previously artistic director of the MATA Festival, a showcase for new music by young composers. He holds a doctorate from Cornell University.
