HOUSTON – (Nov. 16, 2020) – They say necessity is the mother of invention. In the case of composer Badie Khaleghian, a doctoral candidate at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music, necessity is the pandemic and its restrictions, while invention is his unique new interactive piece: “Let Your Voice Be Heard.”
Designed to be performed via Zoom by six woodwind players, Khaleghian’s piece allows audience members to “vote” on its progression; it’s not unlike a classic "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, but with nine sections or scenes instead of chapters. The players will react in real time to the viewers’ online votes, meaning no two performances will be quite alike.
Indeed, there are 1,024 possible permutations of “Let Your Voice Be Heard,” which will be performed in a free, worldwide concert Nov. 19 at 6 p.m. as part of the New Art/New Music series at Rice.
It was inspired, Khaleghian said, by artwork currently on display at the Moody Center for the Arts in its ongoing “States of Mind: Art and American Democracy” exhibition, on view through Dec. 19. “Official Unofficial Voting Station,” a colorful faux polling location by artist Aram Han Sifuentes, encourages guests to cast paper “ballots” that question the U.S. electoral system and who is excluded from it.
“It was very interesting to me, because it gives a second chance to people to participate in some sort of voting process,” said the Iranian-born Khaleghian, who cast his own vote for the first time as an American citizen this year and has long been a fan of Sifuentes’ politically minded art. “I thought, OK, I can actually do the same thing musically: give my audience a vote, and then they can hear the voting in real time.”
Each semester, composers from the Shepherd School are invited to respond to pieces on display in the current Moody Center for the Arts exhibition. Their compositions are performed by their fellow Shepherd School musicians in a concert of new music (a genre also referred to as contemporary classical music).
In addition to Khaleghian’s “Let Your Voice Be Heard,” three other Shepherd School composers wrote pieces made for broadcasting across the internet while adhering to pandemic restrictions. There is a solo violin piece; an electronic improvisation incorporating found sounds and computer algorithms; and a fixed media piece that is, implicitly, not live to begin with.
Three of the four New Art/New Music pieces will be featured in a virtual concert Nov. 18 at noon on the Moody Center’s YouTube channel. The sound and performances were captured in front of Rodney McMillian’s “Untitled (The Supreme Court Painting),” one of the centerpieces of the “States of Mind” exhibition.
“Let Your Voice Be Heard” will offer a different sound, in part because its six woodwind players will be performing in their individual homes across the country, including one oboist in Alaska.
Khaleghian worked with the Moody Center to ensure that all six parts would come across simultaneously on Zoom — a triumph of audio engineering that overcame Zoom’s limitations: Usually only one person’s voice can be heard at a time. With “Let Your Voice Be Heard,” audience members will hear all six performers at once.
But as with democracy itself, it only works if people actually vote.
“If you don't have any voting participants, we cannot perform the music,” Khaleghian said.
WHAT: "Let Your Voice be Heard": A Virtual, World-Wide, Interactive Concert.
WHEN: Nov. 19, 6 p.m. CST.
WHERE: Via Zoom; registration is required.
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This news release can be found online at news.rice.edu.
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Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,978 undergraduates and 3,192 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.