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Mesut Ozgen: A
Guitar Odyssey
Mesut
OZGEN - Photo by Paul Schraub
by Adam COTTON
In the same way most people can enjoy a good movie without
any pretenses of what the story may be about, classical
music concert producers are constantly faced with the
challenge of making their programs appeal to unfamiliar
concert goers. Especially in the world of contemporary
music where even experienced audience members are hearing
pieces for the first time, how can performers and producers
utilize all available resources to make such a presentation
as effective and memorable as possible? One artistic solution
to this question may reside in an emerging breed of multimedia
classical concert presentations.
At
the forefront of this embryonic trend is New Dimensions
in Classical Guitar, a collaborative effort of a multidisciplinary
team featuring Mesut Özgen on guitar. Frequently
collaborating with accomplished, innovative composers,
award-winning guitarist Özgen champions new music
for guitar. With eclectic tastes rooted predominantly
in traditional and folk musics of the world, he has worked
with many composers to combine avant–garde compositional
techniques with traditional tunes and rhythms.
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New
Dimensions in Classical Guitar, the prototype of a planned international tour, will see its first
three performances during March of 2004 in Santa
Cruz California. The show will feature Özgen
performing innovative, contemporary pieces in fluid
worlds of light and subtly shifting imagery. All
around him his team will be creating subdued optical
worlds akin to watching the reflection of a sunset
on the surface of a placid lake, as the watery images
of clouds slowly but majestically transform from
fiery oranges through sweet pinks and soft violets
and finally finding their way into lingering dream-laden
shades of indigo and blues. In such a setting, Özgen
and his talented artistic team: Gustavo Vasquez,
video; Peter Elsea, digital images; and David Lee
Cuthbert, scenic/lighting design, aspire to create
an artful world where the music stays in the forefront
of an intriguing but delicate ever-shifting visual
wonderworld that peaks the listener's interest throughout
the show without overpowering the music. Seeking
to avoid the repetitiousness that plagues most current
concert imagery (the screen-saver syndrome), the
crew has been working with the pieces as individual
entities, visually bringing out musical contrasts
through lighting shifts, stage manipulations and
digital-optical effects.
Mesut
OZGEN - Photo by Paul Schraub
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Özgen
began playing guitar while studying medicine in his native
Turkey in 1981. During his seven years as a medical doctor
in Sason and Ankara, he also played concerts to sold out
audiences and taught guitar at two universities. American
guitar virtuoso and composer Benjamin Verdery, after witnessing
two of Özgen's performances at the Paco Peña
Guitar Festival in Cordoba, Spain in 1989 and 1990 invited
Özgen to study with him at Yale University. Mesut
decided to take the invitation, giving up his medical
practice which included delivering babies and performing
surgeries, and come to the states to study music. After
receiving his Master of Music and being the first guitarist
honored with the Dean's prize, the highest award of the
Yale School of Music, Özgen traveled to Arizona State
University to study with the acclaimed guitarist Frank
Koonce and work on his DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts) in
solo performance. Özgen has been on the University
of California, Santa Cruz guitar faculty since 1998. During
his time in Santa Cruz he has given several notable concerts
including "Folkie Classical Guitar", a program
based on Turkish, Spanish, Greek, Argentinean, and American
folk cultures and featuring special stage decorations
and outfits. He also conducted the world premier of Verdery's
"Pick and Roll" for guitar ensemble, featuring
a basketball player in rhythmic dialogue with the guitarists.
In addition he has performed on lute, baroque guitar,
and 19th century guitar with the Santa Cruz
Baroque Festival's Lux Musica ensemble. Also, Özgen has collaborated in other concerts
with non-western musicians, such as Deepak Ram, Indian
bansuri player, and Ihsan Özgen, internationally
renowned Turkish classical kemençe player (also
Mesut's uncle).
The
idea for a multimedia classical guitar presentation grew
out of Özgen’s experiences with audiences’
reactions to classical guitar recitals. Speaking mainly
of non-musician audience members, he observes that people
like the concerts but have difficulty holding their attention
through the end of the show. For such audience members
who also attend more active or decorative theatre performances,
pop concerts, or even movies, the absence of anything
else happening on the stage becomes monotonous.
After a while to many in the audience, the music starts
to sound the same, regardless of the quality of the performance.
Özgen and his team are working to remedy this common
experiential occurrence through the idea of looking at
the concert as a holistic, artistic, audio-visual experience.
Elements such as stage props, imagery, colors, transitions,
and lighting will be carefully considered both from the
perspective of the individual piece and in the context
of the larger production. Using this synergetic combination
of ingredients, Özgen and his crew are engineering
a colorful mutant unlike any classical guitar concert
ever produced before.
Ozgen's
multidisciplinary artistic team consists of Gustavo Vasques,
video and stage choreography; Peter Elsea, digital images
and multimedia design; and David Lee Cuthbert, scenic/lighting
design and stage choreography. Vasques has directed over
thirty productions including documentaries, video installations
and dramas. He currently has a multimedia exhibit called
"Who am I?" for Chicano Now nationally
touring museums. He is also a prooud recipient
of The Rockefeller Media Fellowship and Eureka Visual
Artist Fellowship awards. Vasquez currently teaches classes
in The University of California, Santa Cruz's film and
digital media department. Elsea, the current director
of UCSC's amazing electronic music program, is a pioneer
realm of software design for electronic musicians. His,
"Lobjects" software has become standard in electronic
music studios around the world. One of his current projects,
which will be showcased in this concert, is devising an
interactive tool kit of sound-sensitive computer generated
imagery software that musicians can integrate into their
live performances. David Lee Cuthbert has designed lighting
for numerous by area and national threatres, plays and
theme park attactions including The Adventures of Spider-Man,
The Ride at Orlando's Universal Studios and Alice
in Modernland at Sledgehammer Theatre.
The
program features several world premiers, all written for
Mesut, including Be Kind all the Time
by Benjamin Verdery, Surya
by Deepak Ram, Sortija
by Pablo Ortiz, La Guitarra by Robert Strizich and the American premiere of Stars by Anthony Gilbert. Be Kind all the
Time
will be performed on a prepared guitar (using chopsticks
and paperclips) in a non-traditional tuning with digital
delay! Within Surya for bansuri (traditional Indian flute) and guitar, composer
and performer Deepak Ram has found a colorful crossroads
where the forms and feelings of Indian music meet with
contrasting transitions and other freedoms of contemporary
classical music. The show begins with the intricate and
passionate work, Sonata: Ondas do Mar de Vigo, by UCSC alumnus/faculty Christopher Pratorius.
Sortija,
another solo piece in the program, written by UC Davis
faculty composer Pablo Ortiz, is based around game children
play with a large ring on merry-go-rounds in Argentina.
Listeners can also look forward to a beautiful arrangement
of the romantic frontier tune Shenandoah by Robert Beaser, the current chairman of the composition department
at The Julliard School, and Variations on a Turkish
folk theme (Asik Veysel's "Uzun ince bir yoldayim")
by Carlo Domeniconi. Some of these works can be found
on Mesut's new CD "Troubadour" released by Golden
Horn Records (www.goldenhorn.com).
A
marriage of classical music and visual arts, New Dimensions
in Classical Guitar offers audiences an exciting and groundbreaking
peek into the future of concert music presentation.
_ . _
New Dimensions
in Classical Guitar premiere performances:
Friday, March 5 and Saturday, March 6 2004 at the University of
California Santa Cruz Music Center Recital Hall as part
of the 2003-04 Arts & Lectures season http://events.ucsc.edu/artslecs/ARTISTS.03-04/NewDimensions.html
Saturday, March 13, 2004 at the Mello Center for the Performing
Arts as part of the 2004 season Artists in Residence Performance
Series of Pajaro Valley Performing Arts Association in
Watsonville, CA
http://www.mellocenter.com/
E-mail
to Mesut Ozgen: mozgen@cats.ucsc.edu
About
Adam COTTON
Adam COTTON was born and raised
in Austin, Texas. He started playing the acoustic guitar
at age twelve, inspired by seeing how much fun some performers
seemed to have and soon found a comfortable creative outlet
in the instrument. In due time, he moved to Santa Cruz,
California to attend the University of California. By
his second year of college, he had become immersed in
the music program, and was devoting the majority of his
time to learning, practicing, and composing in the classical
style. He recieved the Dean•s Undergraduate Award
for his String Quartet No. 1: The Waves. His music has
been performed in Tenessee, Indiana and California. Adam
is now teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area
as well as pursuing various explorations and collaborations
in composing and performing classical, electronic, and
acoustic music. He can be contacted at adamcotton@skyhighway.com.
Website: www.adamcotton.net
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