Monica Demarco took the music she wrote over the past five years and turned it into a multimedia extravaganza for her senior recital - the cherry atop her music composition and theory degree sundae.
Two of those pieces, "Fray" and "Hijas de la Chingada," won the UNM Composers' Symposium this year and last. She's also majoring in piano performance.
The hour-long performance, "Sensory Glut," is Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. in Keller Hall.
Demarco collaborated with 20 artists to infuse the show with dance, visual art and theatrical and musical performances.
For her piece "Color," she asked three of her piano students, ages 6, 13 and 22, to compose piano music based on the color, space and depth of Demarco's oil paintings.
"It was kind of building on this idea of a graphic score - that a score doesn't have to be what we traditionally think of as notes on a staff," she said. "Often, people use visual terms when they're talking about sound."
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Her 6-year-old niece will be the first to go on of the three students, who also used the poem "The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly" as inspiration.
"She took what she knew about that poem and what she saw in that painting and made a piece," Demarco said. "She also uses a lot of really modern techniques, like, things that I hadn't taught her that she wanted to do. She wanted there to be a big explosion, so she was using all these elbow clusters. And she was trying to do a glissando for something, and it was, like, 'Oh, you want to do that? Let me help you,' but she already had these ideas. I didn't have to guide her very much."
Sabine Wilden from Germany will perform Demarco's "Heart" on the piano. It's based on the beats per minute of a heart rate during different periods in people's lives. The piece starts with a sleeping heart rate, at 40 to 50 beats per minute, and goes up to panic mode - 200 beats per minute.
"I wanted to start in sleep because I think that that could be ambiguous to whether it's a birth or a death and kind of build from that clear space," she said. "But it does end with the panic one. She actually has to run around the piano to raise her heart rate. She, as the performer, has to try to match her heart rate to what she's playing. So before she comes out onstage, she has to do some breathing and relaxation exercises to bring down her heart rate. Through playing, it naturally sort of raises."
"Truth" is based on the poem Maya Angelou dedicated to UNM when she visited in 2005.
"It was beautiful, and it was an earth-shaking experience for me," Demarco said. "I was taking this audio editing class, and then I went out and recorded sounds all over Albuquerque, like at the train station and all kinds of different places and compiled them into a piece based on her text."
Her friend, Rachel Shapiro, choreographed a dance reminiscent of clowning and Kabuki Theater, a stylized Japanese dance-drama, Demarco said.
"It's dance but it's also very theatric," she said. "She's very expressive with her face and her body."
Demarco is especially excited to see "Fray," which won the music symposium this year, performed with a string quartet. It's the most academic piece in the recital, she said. After graduation, she said she will continue to grow artistically in Albuquerque, and then maybe get her masters in Berlin.
"Albuquerque shouldn't be a place that we have to leave - it should be a place to build," she said.
'Sensory Glut'
Wednesday, 8:30 p.m.
Keller Hall
Free
