Glenn Korff School Cellist performing in Switzerland tour for new Machover composition
calendar icon25 Mar 2015
Lepard is traveling in late March to Switzerland to work with Machover and the ensemble and to experiment with the electronic hyperinstruments that Machover’s MIT Media Lab produces to workshop the details of the new composition.
“Justin is one of the most unusual musicians I have had the pleasure to work with,” said his UNL cello professor, Research Associate Professor Gregory Beaver, who is with the Chiara String Quartet. “He thrives on the thorns and steep precipices of abstract and modernist music, revels in technical difficulty approaching the ridiculous and calmly turns the impossible into a blistering performance. Tod Machover is one of the visionaries in music today, and connecting with him on such an important piece touring the world will certainly open doors for both Justin and for UNL as its ambassador.”
Last summer, Lepard was chosen to participate in the Lucerne Festival Academy, a new music festival in Switzerland founded by world-renowned composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. It was there he met Machover who is this year’s composer-in-residence for the Festival. Lepard interviewed with him and was chosen to participate in this ensemble of 10 people that will premiere his newest composition this Fall on tour in September.
“My background in playing a lot of different styles and improvising was a good match, and he decided I was the cellist he wanted,” Lepard said. “So I’m very thankful for that.”
Machover is the head of the MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future group. An influential composer, he has been praised for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries. In 1995, he received a "Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres," one of France's highest cultural honors, and in 1998 he was awarded the first DigiGlobe Prize from the German government.
He has composed five operas and is the inventor of hyperinstruments, a technology that uses smart computers to augment virtuosity. They have been used by performers such as Yo-Yo Ma, Prince and Peter Gabriel.
“I’m really excited,” Lepard said. “While he gave us some things to prepare, I don’t feel that performance pressure. It’s just experimenting. I’ll be able to clear my head by trying out these new hyperinstruments, something I’ve never been able to do before. Having creative input for a major project and working with some of the most outstanding young new musicians in the world is thrilling.”
Lepard describes the hyperinstruments being like an automatic effects pedal board.
“Instead of having pre-set knobs and pressing buttons, the hyperinstrument is a normal instrument that has sensors over it,” he said. “So how you play the instrument affects what sound will come out because of computer software designed by the Media Lab.”
Machover’s piece is expected to be about 60 minutes in length and will reference elements of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, “Hey Jude” by the Beatles and electronic music of the 1950’s and 1960’s by such composers as Stockhausen and Xenakis. Everything will be either memorized or improvised by the 10 musicians in the ensemble, which will have no conductor.
“It’s an ensemble of soloists,” Lepard said. “We are individuals doing our own thing, but at the same time, we’re connected to one another. We will rely only on all visual and aural cues. Machover wants to draw on a lot of different elements that play between the acoustic instruments and the electric sides of instruments. He wants to explore what happens in between.”
The piece will both make reference to that music that already exists, as well as synthesize all of those elements and combine them, using hyperinstrument technology to achieve the middle ground in between those elements.
“To me it’s really exciting that we can be emulating music that was made not with instruments at all, but only synthesizers and technology,” Lepard said.
Following the workshop in March, Machover will finish writing the piece. Lepard will have the summer to rehearse, before leaving Aug. 15 for rehearsals and the tour.
Lepard says the project draws on his strengths.
“I’ve always been interested in things that are different and require me to think a little bit more,” he said. “I tend to think a lot, so any music that requires me to be more analytical, it feels like more holistic musicianship. That’s just what I like.”
Lepard saw his first cello at age three and immediately fell in love with the instrument.
“The first time I saw a cello I was three. I went to a performance of a family friend, and I was just in love,” he said. “I tried playing a little guitar and a little piano, but there’s never been an instrument that I wanted to play other than cello. If I weren’t a cellist, I don’t know that I’d be a musician. I love it. It’s the perfect instrument.”
He began learning the cello via the Suzuki method when he was five years old under Leslie Tien and started private lessons with Beaver at age 16.
“The type of reflection I perceive Greg to have done for his own playing seems to be a perfect complement for my own journey learning music,” Lepard said. “He wanted to support whatever I was doing. He understands that whatever you love, that’s what you’re going to be the best at.”
Freshman year, Lepard studied jazz cello and took lessons from Professor Darryl White. He wants to master all different genres.
“There’s never been a genre that I haven’t been able to take the cello to and feel like it has a place there,” he said.
Following graduation this May and the touring with this project, Lepard has several local performance opportunities that he is pursuing, while also approaching new music with an entrepreneurial spirit.
“I am in the process of starting a YouTube channel of music videos, with all the visual production you might find in more popular styles, but for contemporary classical music,” he said. “My goal is to be earning a living by performing music locally in Lincoln and Omaha, but also pursuing those external opportunities to build my career both in the Midwest and globally.”
This Machover composition project fits in with his long-term goal to change the way people think about the cello.
“There are a lot of people that play, and the whole thing is a shtick: ‘Look, I’m playing AC-DC. . . but on the CELLO!’” Lepard said. “I’d love to see a world where it’s just, ‘Oh yeah, that’s how a cello plays in a rock band.’ And it’s not just emulating guitar, and it’s not just being a little different, but it really, genuinely adds to the experience in a way that’s compelling enough for people to learn the cello just to do that.”