Music by Jef Derderian, Tristan Selzler, and Zack Teran will be featured along with the world premiere of Arroyos, a collaboration between Reno Modern Brass, composer and electronic musician Domenico Lacala, and poet and astronomer Tony Berendsen.
Paul Fleming, the trombonist of Reno Modern Brass, says that discussions about Arroyos started about a year and a half ago.
'I started talking with my friend Dom Lacala, who goes under the performance name of Nico's Mystery. He's a DJ, he's an electronic composer, and we were just chatting about, okay, what's the best way to get us together? … The more we talked about it, the more we thought, well, what if we loop in another element, which is space? And obviously when you're talking about space and astronomy and the arts, there's really only one person in Reno who you need to be talking to, and that's Tony Berendsen, who is, in addition to being a very community-minded astronomer, he obviously runs Tahoe Star Tours, but he's also a poet.'
Their discussions turned to arroyos, which are, in Fleming's words, 'dry creek beds. Sometimes they're running, sometimes they're dry, they're seasonally affected, just like we have in our desert here in Nevada.'
Berendsen also brought in the Drake equation, which employs 'a series of variables when you multiply them together, it's something like here's how many stars are in our galaxy, here's how many stars in our galaxy have planets, here's how many stars in our galaxy that are capable of hosting life. And then within that, how many of these planets that have life are capable of communicating, either sending or receiving, or both, messages from us or to us.' Berendsen's text exploring both meanings of the word 'arroyo' was then set to music by Lacala for the April 3 world premiere performance.
renomodernbrass.com for more.
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