Foot in the Door Ensemble to Present a 'Green Concert,' with Music Inspired by Nature

Foot in the Door, The Hartt School's contemporary music ensemble, will present a "green" program of new music inspired by nature and confronting issues of landscape, ecology, and climate change.

The "Green Concert" will take place on Wednesday, March 20, at 7:30 p.m., in Lincoln Theater. There is no admission charge.

Composers in the 20th and 21st centuries have gone beyond the depiction of nature as a poetic experience to close observation of natural processes and phenomena themselves. This deepening engagement with nature is at the heart of this program.

Charles Ives's The Housatonic at Stockbridge is a portrait of a river where the musical lines actual mirror the flow of water currents. John Cage’s Branches uses amplified cacti and other plants as the actual sound sources of the piece. Eleanor Hovda's Ariadne is open, improvisatory, and richly textured, suggesting a field of buzzing sounds like insects in sound and motion. John Luther Adams's Dream in White on White is evocative of the vast, open, and austere spaces of his native Alaska.

Hartt Professor Robert Carl'sThe Inevitable Wave (in its premiere) takes a single 10-second ocean wave and stretches it into 10 minutes of white noise crescendo, with chamber orchestra accompaniment. The work emerges from the composer's response both to the 2011 Japanese tsunami and the looming threat of environmental catastrophe.