The members of the String Trio of New York stride onstage at the UVM Recital Hall at Southwick, bow, station themselves resolutely behind their music stands and begin talking.
Guitarist James Emery launches into a disquisition on improvisation. The boundary between composed and improvised music, he suggests to the student audience, is a loose one. Think of composed music as improvisation upon reflection and improvisation as spontaneous composition, he says.
Violinist Rob Thomas adds that a goal of the critically acclaimed trio, which plays a riveting blend of swing jazz and often atonal classical music, is to generate a lot of energy, but without the volume associated with electric instruments.
After the trio plays a brief composition, bassist John Lindberg wants the audience to guess where and how much the musicians improvised.
The talk show and musical examples are for the benefit of about 20 students in UVMs new Honors College (along with a few other interested undergraduates), who are enjoying a 30-minute dialogue with the musicians as part of a one-credit course called Music in Live Performance.
The class requires students to attend five sessions like this one, as well as the Lane Series concerts that follow, and to keep journals of their musical experiences, which they turn in at the end of the semester to Lane Series director and course instructor Jane Ambrose.
The course was co-developed by old friends Ambrose, a longtime chair of UVMs music department before moving to the Lane in 1989, and Honors College dean Bob Taylor, and is a product of their mutual self-interest.
For Ambrose, the goal is to expose undergraduates to serious music across a variety of genres, and to build an audience for offerings like those of the Lane Series.
For Taylor, its about creating a panorama of enrichment opportunities for honors students.
Like an NFL executive managing a salary cap by juggling supporting-cast players with stars, Taylors concept is to mix big-ticket events, like the Presidents Distinguished Presidential Lecture Series address eminent Islamic studies scholar John Esposito gave last fall, which the college helped sponsor, with less expensive productions.
To stretch his budget, Taylor isnt above taking advantage of his or his colleagues personal relationships with well-known artists, writers and thinkers.
Last year, for instance, when Taylor brought a colleague, environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben, to a special colloquium and dinner for honors students that was a peak experience at a price well below market.
Taylor puts special energy into prospecting within two of UVMs most underutilized resources, as he calls them, for undergraduate education, the Lane Series and the Fleming Museum.
He hopes to match the Lane Series course, which has also exposed students to young pianist Vassily Primakov, classical guitar virtuoso Paul Galbraith, and Brazilian jazz vocalist and Down Beat magazine darling Luciana Souza, with another one-credit offering that would give students special access to new Fleming exhibits.
Theyre really world-class acts, says Honors College student Joe Kubacz of the artists in the course. Its not every day you get an opportunity to talk with people like that.
Give the enterprising Taylor a few more years, and that might not be the case.
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