30 October - Mitchell Clark
Ethnomusicologist, Composer, Curator
On October 30 at 2:30 pm, Mitchell Clark will give a public lecture in the conference room of Chester College of New England's Wadleigh Library. Chalfin is a visiting artist, part of the college's Visiting Artist Lecture Series.
Trained as a composer and an ethnomusicologist, Mitchell Clark has been active as a writer about
music and as a curator. Recently a Research Fellow in the department of musical instruments at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, he curated Sounds of the Silk Road: Musical Instruments of Asia (on view at the MFA, 2005-06) and wrote the book of the same title that accompanied the exhibition. As an ethnomusicologist he specializes in Chinese music and has written extensively about the qin, the classical Chinese seven-string zither. His publications have appeared in the books The Resonance of the Qin in East Asian Art (1999) and Sound and Light: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela (1996), as well as in periodicals such as the Galpin Society Journal, Experimental Musical Instruments, and Nhac Viêt: The Journal of Vietnamese Music. Currently based in Providence, Rhode Island, he was recipient of the Fellowship in Music Composition from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts in 2002. As a composer, his studies included those with Alvin Lucier, Kenneth Gaburo, and Henry Brant, and recent activities have included performances throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. His A Fine Day for the Curious (and Wet) has been included annually in WaterFire Providence since 2001. Additionally, he writes fiction and has published translations of Chinese poetry.
Compass Rose interviews Mitchell Clark:
Compass Rose: In general, who and what were your influences throughout school, and how did you inevitably end up studying music?
Mitchell Clark: Early on my interests were in science, but I enjoyed music a lot and at thirteen I got the idea that it was something I could do myself. I learned guitar, largely teaching myself, and immediately began composing instrumental pieces and songs. This quickly displaced my interest in science. As a composition student at conservatory I had the opportunity to study Korean music, and Asian music in general, and all this affected me deeply.
CR: How do you think being raised in New England influenced you growing up?
Clark: As I say, my early interests were science related, and my love was the biology of seashores. So my stomping grounds were the shores of Rhode Island and, in the summer, Maine. Who knows if I ever would have gone on to study marine biology, but there’s something about seashores that remains fundamental for me. Some of it is symbolic, perhaps—one world edging up against another—but for me its more textural, with all senses of perception involved. (more)
Call for Visual Art
Compass Rose, a journal of art and literature, seeks visual art submissions for its 2008 issue. While we consider all mediums, we can only print black and white images. Please send 1 to 3 high resolution images on a CD as well as a short bio to:
Compass Rose
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