Eruption with a 19th Century slant

Ever wondered what Ed might sound like on the cello he took up a couple of years ago? Chicago-based classical string sextet "Eighth Blackbird" apparently has.

The avant garde ensemble, formed in 1996 when the members were undergraduates in Ohio's Oberlin Conservatory, has comissioned original works to explore all the diversity that may be celebrated on their classical instruments. Their most recent work, "The Glam Seduction," is described as "the 1980s rock music of Eddie Van Halen meets the instrumentation of Niccolo Paganini". It's hard to believe that the world had to wait until the twenty-first century to hear the music of the greatset violin virtuoso of the ninteenth century along with the music of the greatest guitar virtuoso of the twentieth, but this wrong has now been made right.

Nicholas Photinos, Eighth Blackbird's cellist, describes the work which includes a violin transcription of "Eruption" by Los Angeles composer D.J. Sparr as "A broad range of styles," adding "I think it's kind of his homage to glam rock. I think the similarities are just the sense of melodrama. It's as if we were to play an 80's hairband piece."

This is a sharp contrast to "Indigenous Instruments" and "Violence," pieces comissioned to "capture the flavor of indigenous, tribal music for an imaginary culture" and "an exploration of aesthetic violence", respectively. "Our mission, I would say, is to present contemporary music that we like in as many ways as possible," Photinos says. "We develop pieces slowly to come to a greater understanding of them and really present them in the best light to the audience."

Copyright 2004 Van Halen News Desk