Musical works by Union professors Tim Olsen and Hilary Tann will be featured in “Mysterious Mountains” on Sunday, Nov. 4, at 4 p.m. in Memorial Chapel.
The free concert includes the world premiere of Olsen's “Blue Line” for brass and tympani, and Tann's 1992 composition “Adirondack Light” for chamber orchestra and narrator. Carl George, professor emeritus of biology, will narrate the text, adapted from a poem by Jordan Smith, professor of English.
Also on the program are “Mysterious Mountain” by Alan Hovhannes; and “The Tender Land, Orchestra Suite from The Opera” by Aaron Copland.
The concert commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks, will feature more than 200 performers from the Capital Region.
With Victor Kliash conducting, participants include the Union College Community Orchestra, the Schenectady and Albany Symphonies, the Union College Choir, the Siena College Community Chorale, the University at Albany Choir and the First Presbyterian Church of Albany Choir.
A benefit reception and dinner in the College's Hale House Dining Hall follows the performance. Tickets at $100 per person are available by calling 377-1452. Proceeds benefit the educational work of the association, the oldest citizen advocate and educator about the New York State Forest Preserve.
They're not like most candidates. For one thing, they're younger.
For another, they see in Union College an untapped potential to change the political, economic and social landscape of Schenectady.
They are Loralynne Krobetzky '00 and Mike Welch '02, Green Party candidates for Schenectady City Council and Schenectady County Legislature, respectively. They are, at least in some memories, the first young alumna and student to seek local elected office.
“The potential of Union has been completely ignored in all the debates and discussions we've had as candidates,” said Krobetzky. “Students have money and time,” adds Welch. “They can be some of the best consumers and (political activists) around.”
“We want to entice Union students to have a say about what's going on in Schenectady,” said Krobetzky. “This is their home for most of four years.”
The challenge, they acknowledge, is to get students more involved off campus. “A lot of (students) think Schenectady ends at the wrought iron fence,” said Krobetzky. So, things like field trips for first-year students to retailers on Upper Union and Jay Street would go a long way toward getting students out in the community, they said.
Krobetzky and Welch say that having just 10 Union students show
up at a City Council meeting would send a strong message to city officials that Union students are a political factor.
Krobetzky, a native of Peekskill who lives in Schenectady, says a key element of her campaign is to restore cooperation between the city council and the mayor. “One of the tenets of my campaign is to take back the city council for the people,” she said.
She said she also would like to see a comprehensive plan for revitalization of Schenectady that focuses more on getting funding for neighborhood organizations and parks, and low-interest loans for small neighborhood businesses.
Krobetzky, who majored in English, has been a tutor at Yates Elementary School, and a volunteer at a number of community organizations. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. and teach literature at a college. Of her political life, she says, “Now I can't leave behind my new role as community leader. I feel I have an obligation to continue this campaign after the election.”
Welch, a junior physics major from North Andover, Mass., became politically active for ecological reasons, having organized a recycling program in the physics department. “I had a narrow view of the Green Party,” he said, “but after meeting with some people, I began to see what a grassroots organization can accomplish.”
As a candidate for county legislature, he opposes the proposed Glenville Power Plant and favors the development of fuel cell technology. He also wants to push for the remediation of six “superfund” sites in the county.
“If we raise the issues, the other parties will have to respond,” he says. Adds Krobetzky, “Even if the officials and candidates don't take action, the public will.”
Ed Pavlic's poetry is all about music and the memories it evokes.
Take “Bedtime Stories by Roberta Flack,” one of the poem's in Pavlic's Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue, which has won the 2001 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize.
The poem was inspired by Pavlic's niece, who would urge him to tell stories about the time he and his sisters were growing up. It alludes to the fears and misunderstandings of a young boy who lies awake at night listening to adult conversations and the television downstairs, and the haunting strains of Flack's “Killing Me Softly” on his radio.
“That's a romantic song, if you're an adult,” Pavlic says. “But if you're a kid and you're scared of the dark and your radio comes on with a song about a woman talking about a guy killing her softly with his song … I would just turn it off.”
Pavlic, who admits he is still scared of the song, can play it back in his head and evoke the feelings that come out in the poem: connections to fear and loss and a joy for the togetherness that a little kid might feel for his big sisters.
Pavlic often asks his students, “Aren't there songs that involuntarily take you back to places you've been? All of a sudden you're there. The song comes on and you can smell things from the time you remember. It just becomes this aura.”
Paraph of Bone draws heavily on the poet's musicality, in particular his penchant for the blues and the improvised art form known as jazz. Many of his lines resemble musical riffs, and there are frequent references to musicians such as Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis. Pavlic, an assistant professor of English who specializes in Africana studies, calls his book “an extended blues about people who can't, and so didn't, live without each other.”
The APR/Honickman Prize includes publication of the book, a $3,000 cash award, and distribution through Copper Canyon Press, a leading publisher of poetry books.
Poet Adrienne Rich, who awarded the prize and wrote the book's forward, said “Pavlic has listened closely to our most profound American art, the blues and jazz, and that music has not only helped him achieve poetic art form but allowed him to explore a mesh of experience extraneous to literary theories.”
Yusef Komunyakaa, a Pulitzer Prize winner, writes in the cover blurb of Pavlic's poetry, “A contained structural improvisation focuses each poem in a white space underlying the text – held like a mantra of boiled-down innuendo that is tinted with the blues of jazz and literary-cultural folklore.”
For the title of the book, “paraph” (a flourish at the end of one's signature) and “bone” combine to convey a sort of exuberance at the core of who we are, Pavlic says. (A paraph also was used to prevent forgery; the inference underwrites the singularity of signatures and poems.) The rest of the title, borrowed from Davis' landmark exploration in modal jazz that featured prolonged invention within a single scale, refers to the wide spectrum of human experience. “(The title) is a provocation that says 'you're not going to get all of this,'” Pavlic says. “There's a kind of mystery to it, and I liked the way it sounded.”
“A lot of times I start poems with sounds, not even a word, and the words kind of branch out from there,” Pavlic said. “There's a whole musicality to poetry.”
A number of costumed employees were well into the spirit of Halloween across campus on Wednesday.
Even Chester Arthur, or rather his statue, was in a holiday mood.
He wore a large carved pumpkin over his head, complete with toothy smile, an ax in his right hand, and a green cape. A sign read simply “Ichabod,” presumably a nod to the hero in Washington Irving's classic, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
And for those who got close enough to see the small writing, there may be a clue to the identity of Chet's dressers: “An Iota 22 Production.”
