As hard as it is to believe, the Light in Winter weekend has already drawn to a close, with an impressive finale: a performance by the full Ithaca College Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Jeffery Meyer. They performed seven movements from a piece by composer Michael Gandolfi that was inspired by a garden in Scotland known as the “Garden of Cosmic Speculation.”

Composer Gandolfi started off the event by speaking about his creative process – why he was inspired by the garden to compose a piece, and how he was able to transform his visual impressions into musical themes. He showed a series of photos he had taken of the garden during his talk. More photos were shown during the piece’s performance, which helped us to visualize the specific aspects of the garden which had inspired specific movements within the piece.

Gandolfi explained that his piece currently was made up of 11 movements (although he seemed to suggest it could expand in the future), but that he had stipulated that it need not be performed in his entirety. He suggests instead that orchestras perform any number of movements, in whatever order they want – just a visitor could choose to visit only specific parts of the garden. The seven movements chosen for performance here were varied and very interesting to listen to (especially in conjunction with photos of the garden), and the IC orchestra’s performance was very impressive.

…. Looking back, this weekend’s events have all explored Identity in so many different ways – altered identities, secret identities, biological identities, artistic identities, and cultural identities. Taken all together, it makes me realize how important and complex our identities are, both as individuals and as communities. I’m glad that we’ve been able to come together as a community to celebrate these things and learn about new ideas.

I’m already looking forward to another great year of Light in Winter – next January!

The audience’s reaction to the “Who Are We?” talk and performance was overwhelming – everyone seemed to agree that it perfectly represented the spirit of “collaboration” between arts and science that Light in Winter is always striving to achieve.

Binghamton University biology professor David Sloan Wilson discussed examples from the animal world that illustrate that the ideas of personality and community are not unique to humans. His expertise in the field of evolutionary biology was clear.

Meanwhile, the four-person ensemble known as Water Bear performed three beautiful and unusual pieces. Led by violinist Mer Boel, the ensemble uses a system to map the letters of the alphabet to musical notes and thus create melodies out of words. The group performed songs based on the musical themes of words including “community,” “planetary we,” and their own names.

Mer Boel’s compositions were inspired by conversations with Professor Wilson, as well as having read his book “Evolution for Everyone.” In addition, their music was based heavily on improvisation, both as individuals and collaboratively as a group.

The audience clearly appreciated both Wilson’s biological insight and the musical interpretation and accompaniment that Water Bear provided. The two parts came together well, and audience members were quick to complement them on this. The question and answer session was full of inquiries for both Wilson and the musicians.

Composer Bruce Adolphe’s suite of compositions inspired by the paintings of Paul Gauguin were beautifully performed by a sextet of local musicians on violin, cello, bass, flute, clarinet, and percussion. The pieces were interspersed with commentary by Adolphe – speaking on his own process of inspiration, and most interestingly, quotations from Gauguin’s own journals during his life in Tahiti.

The spoken segments and the musical performances were a beautiful way to explore Gauguin’s work and the thoughts that inspired him – as well as inspiring Adolphe to interpret his paintings musically. The pieces dealt with water, storms, and the stunning natural beauty that Gauguin found in Tahiti.

One of the conflicts that was described was between Gauguin and the French critics who continually denigrated his work. The painter’s contemporaries were completely unable to understand his work, criticizing his lack of perspective and formal technique, as well as his wild and unrealistic colors. Excerpts from Gauguin’s journals explained that he believed paintings had to be overly vivid, because they were so much smaller and more constrained than the nature they depicted.

The event only got more interesting when the lights went up and audience members were able to ask Adolphe questions. He explained the creative process behind his compositions, his other musical works inspired by the real world (pieces on dinosaurs, modern art, and even wind power), and his work bringing collaborative music education to schools across the country. He had even visited an Ithaca elementary school yesterday to discuss the pieces inspired by Gauguin with the students. He said that his book, which accompanies a CD of the pieces, can be used by elementary, middle, and high school students as well as adults to learn more about Gauguin and musical interpretation of art!

Last night, Hugh Masekela told the audience to cheer loudly, but not so loudly that they took the roof off of Bailey Hall. But in the end, it was Masekela and his Chissa All-Stars who ended up ripping the roof right off with their energetic and passionate music.

Masekela himself played the flugelhorn, sang, emoted (using his voice to imitate the screeching of a train), told stories, and busted out some great dance moves. He also led a group of dynamic musicians on guitar, bass, percussion, drums, vocals, saxophone, violin, and keyboards.

Saying that he’d be showing the audience a “kaleidoscope” of music happening today in South Africa, Masekela brought on several guest musicians who sang and performed their own songs. Their spirit and energy was amazing and inspirational.

The number of people on their feet and dancing on the aisles was impressive – even for Ithaca! Several times during the show, Masekela managed to get the entire audience (there were a thousand tickets sold!) on their feet, dancing, cheering, and singing along.

After a standing ovation, as the audience trickled out of the performance hall, the band began to play again. We rushed back in to see what was happening. The audience remained on its feet, cheering as Masekela performed his hit 1987 song “Bring Him Back Home,” about Nelson Mandela, as an encore.

The afternoon at the Statler finished off with a collaborative talk called “What Do Robots Dream of?” Cornell engineering professor Hod Lipson talked about his research on robots and teaching them to “evolve” and function independently. His simulations and footage of actual experiments with robots was fascinating.

In one project he described, a robot had to learn how to propel itself forward without any knowledge of its own structure or what it looked like. First the robot had to internally generate a hypothesis about its own structure and test this (through movement), repeating the process over and over until it figured out how it was laid out. Then knowing its structure, the robot had to hypothesize a way to propel itself forward, and then try out methods over and over until it actually succeeded. By experimenting and creating new models, the robot “evolved” its ideas and found a way to function correctly. This and other examples that Lipson discussed gave a glimpse into the future of robotics. In answer to his own question, “Are we there yet?”, he responded “no, not yet,” but it was clear how far we’d already come.

Lipson was followed by philosopher and retired IC professor Lee Bailey, who discussed the philosophical implications of creating robots that seek to emulate humans. Although a bit rambling, Bailey made a good case for why robots will never be able to be like humans in terms of emotions, creativity, and ethics.

Both speakers were supplemented by musicians and musician-robots from the Brooklyn-based League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, who brought two instruments (one resembling an electric bass and one similar to a glockenspiel and a drum kit put together) which were hooked up to laptops and played music via robotic moving parts. The music was interesting, and rather eerie considering that people were not touching the instruments at all. After the end of the performance, audience members crowded up around the instruments to see exactly how they operated.

What do you get when you combine a physics professor, a biology professor, and a comic book writer? As it turns out, a lot of laughter and a very new perspective on familiar superhero stories.

First Roger Stern, an author and comic book writer, described the history of superhero stories and comics over the 20th century, exploring the ideas of alternate identities. (Why do superheroes have a need to hide their face or maintain a “mild-mannered” secret identity?) It was interesting to hear an insider’s perspective on the production of superhero stories.

Next, University of Minnesota physics professor James Kakalios talked about real-life physics and how it is incorporated (sometimes presciently and sometimes a little belatedly) into superhero stories, using comic books and clips from the X-Men movie to demonstrate topics including quantum mechanics and string theory.

The third and final speaker was University of Chicago biology professor Michael LaBarbera, who discussed the biology of B-movie monsters. His scientifically rigorous explanations of atrocious 1950s horror flicks — for example, the giant octopus in “It Came from Beneath the Sea” clearly suffered from a stroke due to blood pressure changes while scaling the San Fransisco Bridge to eat people — were hilarious.

This presentation provided a new angle for examining this weekend’s theme of “Identity.” Most importantly, the three dynamic speakers also provided a light-hearted look at science and an interesting historical examination of a pop-culture phenomena.

The first program at the Statler Auditorium this morning was a humorous and engaging lecture by Cornell professor Jeffrey Hancock. He took us through the worlds of Facebook, mySpace, Internet dating, and financial fraud to show how people disclose, shape, and manipulate their identities with the help of modern technologies.

Professor Hancock brought a scientist’s perspective to a common every-day experiences — interactions with other people and the lies we tell, from white lies and small fibs to more serious fabrications. He discussed differing theories on whether electronic media (cell phone, instant messaging, and email) make us lie more or less than when were communicating with someone face-to-face. It turns out that phone communication has the highest amount of lies told, but the second is face-to-face. Instant messaging and emails have a much lower rate of lies told — probably because IMs and emails can be recorded (saved as computer files or printed out) and people are much less likely to lie when evidence can be produced of what they’ve said.

The speaker also discussed human perceptions of lying and recent psychological evidence on the topic — it turns out that people are actually quite bad at guessing when they’re lied to, and common cues that we think give away lying (like bad eye contact and fidgeting) actually have no correlation with lying in reality. This is due in large part to the “Truth Bias,” a phenomenon which causes humans to naturally assume that other humans they are talking to are generally trustworthy and honest — an assumption that many think is necessary for society to function. One of the most fun and dynamic parts of Hancock’s presentation was his use of “clickers” to conduct real-time polling of the audience members. He even conducted an experiment on perceptions of lying using audience members as the participants!

Welcome to Light in Winter 2008 and another wonderful weekend of arts and science in Ithaca, NY. If you read any of last year’s blog entries, you may remember me — my name is Adrienne and I am an undergraduate student at Princeton University. But more importantly I’m a lifelong Ithacan and I almost always make the trip home to see Light in Winter.

The weekend began last night at the State Theater, with a program called “First Person: Stories from the End of the World.” The show combined dynamic spoken word by NPR’s Neal Conan and Lily Knight, beautiful music by the Ensemble Galilei, and stunning pictures from National Geographic projected on a large screen.

Conan and Knight read first-person narratives from a variety of world explorers, including Matthew Henson (an African-American explorer who overcame prejudice to reach the North Pole), Charles Darwin, Robert Ballard, George Mallory (who died on his third attempt to scale Mount Everest), Jacques Cousteau, and Ibn Battuta (a 14th-century Arab world traveler), among many others. These narratives were accompanied by beautiful nature photos and music from the Ensemble Galilei. The ensemble combined baroque instrumentation with Scottish and Irish traditional music which was occasionally tinged with Middle Eastern and Balkan themes and which provided the perfect stirring backdrop to the narratives.

The first-person stories of exploration ranged from the hilarious (Jacques Cousteau’s description of his intoxicating experience with “the rapture of the deep,” rendered in a fake French accent by Lily Knight) to the truly tragic (a description of a sailor’s accidental death at sea by ship’s captain Allen Villiers). But what brought all the stories together was the light they shed on the pure emotion of exploration. From elation to mysticism to sadness, the stories showed what drives explorers to go further than others. They also revealed that explorers are ordinary people — Charles Darwin was violently seasick on his voyage with the HMS Beagle, and explorers in the far north suffered terribly from the cold and violent weather. Hearing narratives that were written in the first person brought home how human and how much like us these famous explorers were — but how extraordinary they were as well.

I’m now sitting in the atrium of the Statler Auditorium, getting ready to go into the first Saturday morning event — “Digital Deception.” More reporting to come!

Have you pretended to be someone you’re not….online? Ongoing research in the Communication Department at Cornell explores the psychological effects of creating a new identity in online environments. In the Hall of Identity, researchers will have experiments for you participate in so that you can experience these (virtual!) worlds by creating an entirely new you.

To start, Second Life is a virtual reality game where thousands of people from all around the world come together to talk, dance, shop and learn from one another in one virtual community. Come find out why people are talking about Second Life, and see what it’s like to experience life from a different perspective.

http://secondlife.com/

Also, blogs(like this one) are a popular online phenomenon in which people write about their thoughts and their experiences, and then share them with the rest of the world. Some blogs are political, humorous, or serious, but they’re always revealing and they’re always all about you. Come post your experiences on the Festival in Winter Blog, and see if you can fool the world into thinking that you are someone else.

http://festivalcommunityblog.blogspot.com/

Most of all, set aside that weekend of January 18-20 for Light in Winter as we explore the many facets of identity!

Among the many benefits of working in the arts is that you can do things like surf around YouTube for a couple of hours and call it “research”. While viral videos are perpetually entertaining, I do find myself repeatedly looking for videos of musicians with whom I’m familiar. Yesterday, I was browsing around to find a good video of Cyro Baptista and Beat the Donkey, whose polyethnic maelstrom of percussion, dance and song come together to form quite literally the most exciting stage performance I’ve ever seen. I thought, perhaps, it would be difficult to do it justice in a simple low-resolution internet video clip, and indeed, it was pretty tricky to find one.

What I did find, however, were some excellent clips of Cyro performing with a slew of amazing artists. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Cyro’s story, he’s originally from Brazil and he came to the US on a grant to study percussion. He’s a master of world music percussion, and an amazing innovator who invents incredible new instruments, and also uses items like jugs, garbage pail lids and even bubble wrap to extract their percussive sounds. His skill and innovation has led him to become perhaps the most in-demand percussionist in the business - he’s worked with Trey Anastasio (of Phish), Laurie Anderson, Tony Bennett, David Byrne, the Chieftains, Melissa Etheridge, Herbie Hancock, Yo Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis, Bobby McFerrin, Carlos Santana, Phoebe Snow, John Zorn, and a slew of others from wildly disparate genres. Beat the Donkey (a phrase which, in Brazilian Portuguese slang, means “get to it!” or “let’s do it!”) is his own project, his own vision, which incorporates percussion, dance and melody, exploring the musical identities of different cultures and bringing them together in a wildly wonderful performance.

Anyhow, I came across an amazing video of Cyro performing with Yo Yo Ma, Paquito D’Rivera and Kathryn Scott. He’s playing the berimbau, a one-stringed Afro-Brazilian percussive drone instrument. Be sure to note Ms. Scott’s inability to sit still as Cyro pulls the most amazing sounds out of this odd instrument.?Ǭ� (Copy and paste http://youtube.com/watch?v=rBB9_JM-n1g into your browser to watch the video.)

…and for a general idea of what you might see at the show on Sunday night (1/20/08) at the State Theatre, there’s a good clip of that group from the 2006 GrassRoots Festival, where Cyro performed. In case you don’t recognize him from the Yo Yo Ma clip, that’s him in the funny hat. (Copy and paste http://youtube.com/watch?v=c7CiZqUrofA into your browser to watch the video.)