Evelyn Pursley-Kopitzke is contributing to the concert a choral work titled "Reflections"
Evelyn Pursley-Kopitzke was previously featured in "The Arts as Therapy" (August 2007) edition of A! Magazine for the Arts.
She said, "My contribution to this concert is a choral work titled "Reflections" featuring marimba soloist Alan Fey. The architecture and acoustics of the First Presbyterian Church sanctuary create musical reflections, reverberations, and echoes which add to the musical interpretation of visual art that features reflection. The music itself is built on mirror images, echoes, and altered echoes. The concert-goer will be surrounded by antiphonal sound, and visually immersed in the projected art.
She chose the theme for her musical composition directly from the name of the concert/art show, Artistic Reflections II. "I began by choosing paintings that had reflections in them, and then set about creating music that depicts reflection. I also chose this art because I liked the paintings and the color palettes, and I have always liked artwork that depicts light in any form," she said.
"My primary goal was to find a unifying factor in all the artworks that I chose and then thread that factor into all the music of this work," she continued. "What I ended up with was seven movements, all about reflections, mirror images, echoes, and acoustic lag. The unifying factor is NOT reflections, but imperfect or absent reflections -- as seen in the first movement, 'Windblown,' and all the way through six more movements for choir, marimba and organ, with text adapted from the last few verses of I Corinthians 13."
The first artwork she selected is a charcoal drawing by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, of a windblown "Barbizon Landscape." To Kopitzke, the windblown landscape "moves." The second movement, "Reflections," was inspired by Jenny Montigny's "River Country." The third movement, "Love Never Ends," corresponds to Peder Monsted's "Lakeside Forest." The text for the fourth movement, "In a Darkened Mirror," refers to Johann B. Jonkind's "Dutch Costal Scene." Peter Kolean's "Pristine Landscape" has a simplicity that illustrates the text of the fifth movement, "When I Was a Child." The sixth movement is a reprise of the second. For the final movement, "The Greatest of All Is Love," Kopitzke chose William Adolphus Knell's "Boating on a Lake" because "it has such a wonderful light central to the sky and reflected in the lake -- a perfect representation of Perfect Love."
READ ON:
-- BOB GREENE JR. organist for State Street United Methodist Church in Bristol.
-- ANN HOLLER teaches piano and is a lecturer in music at King College in Bristol.
-- BETH McCOY of Abingdon, Va. directs the Mountain Empire Children's Choral Academy and is a diaconal minister in the United Methodist Church.
--- JANE PERRY teaches piano and composes music, although she has been deaf since about age two.
PLUS:
-- Q & A with the composers.
-- A feature on Evelyn Pursley-Kopitzke is among"The Arts as Therapy" (August 2007, A! Magazine for the Arts) stories. To read the entire package, visit http://artsmagazine.info and search with the keyword "therapy."
