Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Image from Watanabe Shötei, Album of Flowers, Plants, Vegetables, and Animals, photo: Randy Batista.

Inspired by a miniature album of paintings by Japanese artist Watanabe Shötei (1851 – 1918) on view in the Show Me the Mini exhibition through November 25, this composition transforms the visual elements in the paintings (line, form, color, impressions from nature) to musical elements (rhythm, meter, pitch, scale, melody). Composed for alto saxophone, the piece builds on natural harmonics and Japanese, microtonal pentatonic scales, as well as Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1874).

Funded by the Cofrin Curator of Asian Art Endowment with support from College of the Arts and School of Music, and co-sponsored by UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment).

Navid Bargrizan (PhD University of Florida, 2018) is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Composition, as well as Adjunct Lecturer of General Humanities at UF. He received MA and BA degrees in systematic musicology, historical musicology, art history, and composition, from University of Hamburg, Germany, and Azad University Tehran, Iran. His research areas include microtonal music, contemporary theatrical music, German Romantic tragedy, and sociopolitical criticism in rock music. Bargrizan’s compositions have been performed in several venues, including New York City Electroacoustic Festival, Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium, Eastern Music Festival, Florida Contemporary Festival, Midwest Music Consortium, and conferences of the Society of Composers Inc.

Swiss saxophonist and composer Laurent Estoppey devotes himself to music and arts of today. In 2016, he was nominated for the Herb Alpert Music Awards. Numerous collaborations with composers have led him to create at least two hundred works. His musical activity is divided between written music and improvisation, and occurs throughout Europe, the Americas, Russia and South Africa. Besides founding and developing numerous chamber music groups, Estoppey is a member and artistic director of Swiss ensemBle baBel and COLLAPSS (music, dance, poetry, visual arts in Greensboro, NC). His discography includes more than twenty recordings on Claves records, Aussenraum Records, Insubordinations, Thödol, Out and Gone and NOVA. As a composer, his works for various settings and contexts include concerts, performances, as well as sound installation and video art works. Estoppey is a reference artist for Italian saxophone maker Rampone-Cazzani, is a D’Addario Performing artist and a Rovner ambassador.

Headed up by Ivy Chen, the Harn Museum Composer-in-Residence program is a cross-boundary program housed within the Asian Wing of the Harn Museum of Art. It grew out of the Poet-in-Residence program under the direction of assistant curator Allysa B. Peyton and poet Debora Greger, which has successfully published two volumes of original poetry (Ink Garden, 2015 and Ink Stone, 2017). Through object study and independent research, Composers-in-Residence develop original works inspired by the Harn’s collection to bring art to life in new creative ways.