|
|
Six Jamesville-DeWitt High School students represented J-D and Onondaga County in their trip to China as performers with the Syracuse Childrens’ Chorus in an International Music Festival in Hong Kong. Kristen El-Hindi, Michelle Michalenko, Erin Molnar, Elana Sukert, Richard Udicious and Carolyn Woiler all traveled to Asia by invitation to participate in an international music festival entitled, "East Meets West", an event which lasted three weeks. Only two other countries were represented, Sweden and Israel.
New York Times
Arts & Leisure
February 9, 1997
A Fiery Minister To the Unconverted
by Allan Kozinn
Eliot Fisk has been reconsidering his approach to the guitar lately. And in the process, he has been pondering the potential of his instrument both as a lure for new classical-music listeners and as a tool for social change.
Once a virtuoso firebrand who focused his energies on the straightforward business of playing classical repertory and contemporary works for approving audiences in comfortable concert halls, he has lately been donating performances to schools and prisons, where he plays for audiences that may never have heard classical music. Sometimes they are openly hostile to it, but since Mr. Fisk remains a virtuoso firebrand, his performances have a certain dazzle factor, which gets the attention of the uninitiated.
"I'm not saying that it's always a glorious experience," Mr. Fisk said during a recent visit to New York. "I've played in plenty of elementary schools where I've had to battle the restless sound of 400 screaming, squirming and squealing kids on a gymnasium floor. On the other hand, I went to some schools in Calabria, in the south of Italy, where people told me that the kids had never heard a live performance of any sort. I had a lot of trepidation, but I went in there and they went bananas. It's worth taking the chance, and I try to do it whenever I can."
It's not that Mr. Fisk has abandoned his conventional career. At 42, he has for the last 20 years been regarded as one of the most electrifying classical guitarists of his generation. An expatriate since 1982, he recently moved to Granada, Spain, after sojourns in Austria and Germany, but he returns to his homeland regularly to perform, and he will present a program of transcriptions, arrangements and fantasies at the Manhattan School of Music on Thursday evening. At a glance, his career is what one expects of a busy soloist: recitals and concerto appearances are broken up by chamber music tours with the flutist Paula Robinson and by teaching at both the Salzburg Mozarteum in Austria and the New England Conservatory in Boston.
But in addition to the time he gives schools, prisons, hospitals and other institutions, Mr. Fisk has been pursuing some far-flung collaborations, including concerts with Paco Peña, a flamenco guitarist; Burhan Urcal, a Turkish percussionist; Lucero Tena, a castanets player, and Brother Blue, an storyteller. Mr. Fisk was performing in a duo with the jazz guitarist Joe Pass, and was about to record with him when Pass died in 1994.
"I'm obsessed with this idea of trying to broaden the appeal," Mr. Fisk said. "My skills are such that I can make a difference, and one of my frustrations is that I cannot put those skills to use often as I'd like. I am constantly telling my management: 'I speak Spanish fluently. Use me. Book me into Spanish communities where I can make a presentation.' "
Mr. Fisk's speech is animated by the same restless energy one hears in his playing. He is given to quoting the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca (in both Spanish and English) and Milton. In fact, he offers lines from "Paradise Lost" as an artistic credo: "What in me is dark/Illumine; what is low, raise and support;/That to the height of this great argument/I may assert eternal Providence,/And justify the ways of God to men."
"That's what an interpreter tries to do," he said. "justify the ways of God to men." Mr. Fisk, more than most performers, tends to speak at his concerts. But regular concert audiences will tolerate only brief comments between works, so for Mr. Fisk, concerts at schools and juvenile detention centers afford an opportunity not only to explain his enthusiasms more fully but also to preach to the unconverted.
"I think of it as ministering to those people," he said. "I derive more satisfaction from that than going out and playing Rodrigo's 'Aranjuez' Concerto for 20 minutes. I love the 'Aranjuez,' and it pays my rent. But I feel put off by this 'soloist and orchestra' thing, where you trot out, you play your bit, and you're not supposed to talk to the audience. It's like being in a play, pretending to be spontaneous. And really, whether I play 10 or 15 more concerts, whether I earn so many thousand more or less a year, is not something that interests me."
Much of this would probably have seemed odd to the younger Eliot Fisk, the one whose 1976 debut at Alice Tully Hall showed him to be a powerhouse player with a hard-driven, precision technique that allowed him to play the guitar with a clarity of line more typical of a keyboard artist. Starting out around the same time as Sharon Isbin, Manuel Barrueco, David Starobin and David Leisner, Mr. Fisk pursued his career with an almost gladiatorial determination. He had the advantage of an endorsement from Andrés Segovia, who regularly singled him out as his favorite among the young generation of guitarists.
Yet Mr. Fisk in his younger years would have shied away from Segovia's arch-Romantic transcriptions (mere approximations in some cases) of works by Haydn, Brahms, Schumann and Franck. Times have changed: now those transcriptions are considered charming, and Mr. Fisk is opening his recital with group of them. He has recorded several of them for MusicMasters, along with a collection of Segovia's folk-song arrangements and compositions that were entrusted to him by Segovia's widow, Emilia. On the recording, he plays them with a warmth and flexible rubato typical of Segovia's style but far removed from the edgy approach for which Mr. Fisk used to be known.
Mr. Fisk's own transcriptions tend to be rigorously detailed arrangements of complete works rather than isolated movements. He has reworked all of Bach's suites and violin sonatas and partitas as well as a Mozart divertimento and all 24 Paganini caprices. Perhaps his most stunning transcription, though, is his of George Rochberg's "Caprice Variations," a 51-minute solo violin work that Mr. Fisk transformed into a thoroughly idiomatic piece for guitar.
"I don't know how he did it, frankly," said Mr. Rochberg, who has since composed for Mr. Fisk. "When I first heard what he had done, I couldn't believe my ears. I thought, there's no way I could have written that, and I was perfectly willing to give him credit for having composed the piece." Mr. Rochberg noted that, Mr. Fisk was thoroughly focused on the classical repertory when they first met, seven years ago. When Mr. Fisk commissioned him to write a solo guitar work, Mr. Rochberg supplied "American Bouquet," which Mr. Fisk will play on Thursday. The score includes glosses on a handful of standards, including Al Dubin's "I Only Have Eyes for You," Gershwin's "Liza" and Hoagy Carmichael's "two Sleepy People." Mr. Rochberg reported with astonishment that Mr. Fisk had never heard the standards.
"It's a great piece," Mr. Fisk says now. "One of the movements is a blues, and it's fun to get the down-home essence of the blues on a classical guitar."
What has made Mr. Fisk loosen up? Part of it could be mellowing with age. Living in Europe, outside the competitive mainstream in which he thrived during the late 1970's, no doubt had an effect, too. He moved to Cologne, Germany, to take a teaching job in 1982. Since 1989 he has taught at the Salzburg Mozarteum, but he has maintained a summer house in Granada for 10 years, and he recently moved there year-round. His new outlook may also be informed by his multiracial family: his wife, Lydia, is German, and her two children from a previous marriage are black.
"The fact that my audiences are de facto segregated drives me up the wall," he said. "My family is 50 percent black, yet my audiences are 99 percent white. I want to try to do something about that. I look at it this way. I'm 42 years old. I figure I have, with luck, 20 more years in which I can traipse around the world carrying my own bags. And I'd like to spend those years making a contribution."
|
|
|
THE POST STANDARD
Thursday, February 3, 2000
Space study takes J-D grad to ends of Earth
Chris Martin is at the South Pole to study galactic dust—the raw material of the stars.
By Sarah Layden
Staff Writer
Over the past seven weeks, Jamesville-DeWitt graduate Chris Martin has lived and worked at the South Pole in temperatures as low as minus 43.
At night, he sleeps in a Korean War-era military tent called a Jamesway and has to cover any cracks to ensure it is dark enough to sleep – the "day" at the pole is six months long, as is the night. To conserve water, Martin can only wash one load of laundry a week, and he’s limited to two two-minute showers a week.
But they’re minor inconveniences when it comes to studying something that’s intrigued him all his life: outer space.
"He’s been thinking about outer space and some connection to it – whether as a research scientist or going to outer space – since he was 7 years old," said his mother, Anne Martin of DeWitt. "He used to draw model space stations."
Chris Martin, 27 is at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station while doing post-doctorate work with the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Institute in Cambridge, Mass. He and his colleagues are trying to get a better understanding of how stars are made by studying galactic dust – the raw material of stars – with a highly tuned telescope.
He arrived Dec. 15 and will be there until [February 8th], summer on Antarctica. Next year, Martin will "winter over" at the pole, from November 2000 to November 2001.
"I’ve been interested in going here long enough that I had gotten to the point that I could imagine myself getting here," Martin wrote in an interview by e-mail. "But wintering over at the pole and doing science were so much what I wanted that I feel very lucky to have gotten this exact position. You can really tell you are right at the South Pole since the sun just goes around and around and around.
At the South Pole, Martin and other scientists spend hours gazing at the sky through a sub-millimeter telescope, trying to unlock the mysteries of the galaxy. The special telescope is needed because the star-forming process occurs behind dusty material that gets in the way, and visible-light telescopes cannot see what is happening.
Conditions at the Pole make it an ideal spot for viewing outer space. At other places on Earth, the water vapor in the air absorbs the light needed to observe molecular clouds where new stars are formed, which Martin calls the stellar nurseries of the galaxy.
The South Pole is extremely dry, and it sits atop a giant glacier at about 10,000 feet – so high water vapor and air don’t get in the way of viewing. The polar plateau is flat for hundreds of miles, so the telescope remains stable, and nothing can shake up the scientists’ measurements, Martin said.
"All of this means that we have extremely good conditions for looking at the high frequency light we want to look at, nearly as good as being in outer space, except it’s much, much cheaper, and a human can stay nearby to fix and maintain the telescope full time," he said.
There are 216 people at the South Pole station, which will close this month. About 70 people in the group are scientists, and the rest are construction workers building a new station, scheduled for completion in 2005.
J-D physics teacher Doug Wilson said Martin comes to mind immediately when students ask him how past students performed on the Advanced Placement physics test.
"There’s only one kid I can remember who has ever completed the test and gotten everything correct," said Wilson, a teacher 27 years. "He was not your typical honors or AP kid. He is probably at the top of that group in terms of ability level and his potential for academic pursuits."
Martin’s childhood experiences were unusual. When he was 9, his parents, Anne and Tom, sent him to Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala. Because of his parents’ work opportunities, the family spent time in Brazil, China, and Peru. Chris Martin, an only child, got to go to all those places when he was young. "He’s now been to more continents than we have," Anne Martin said.
In recent years, Chris Martin has been accumulating the necessary experience to be an astronaut. In addition to his background in physics, he has his pilot’s license, is trained as an emergency-medical technician and has the highest level of ham radio training.
"I can dream, and I certainly will apply, but no matter what I end up doing, I’ll have fun," he said. "One of the dangers of dreaming of becoming an astronaut is to let it determine what you do. Instead, one should just do whatever one enjoys."
Last Thanksgiving, Martin fulfilled a dream when he rented a plane and flew himself from Cambridge to Syracuse. That was the last time his family saw him in person, but the communicate several times a week by e-mail and have spoken with him on the phone once.
Anne Martin is a writer and teaches English as a second language, and Tom is an associate professor of information studies at Syracuse University. Chris Martin’s parents inscribe books they give to him with a favorite saying, "Ad Astra Per Aspera," the Kansas state motto, which means "To the stars through difficulty."
Anne Martin said she wasn’t surprised her son wound up at the South Pole doing outer space research. "He sets his goals and then he works towards them," she said.
|
