University of Nebraska-Lincoln music students composed pieces to celebrate the libraries on campus, taking inspiration from archive materials.
The pieces will be performed on Monday for the Flyover Satellite Concert in Love Library North at 6 p.m. The event is part of a weeklong celebration for the libraries on campus. Love Library South is recognizing 80 years on campus, and Love Library North is celebrating 50 years.
Cyrus Zgud, a third-year music education major who also works for the libraries, initiated the idea for the music school and libraries to work together.
“I brought this idea up to my supervisors and was like, ‘Wait a minute, how cool would it be if we got some artifacts from archives, did a collaboration with the composition studio, and just celebrated the history of this institution and all of the arts and creative things that go on here.’”
There are 11 pairs of composers and performers working together for the concert. The composers worked on a 60- to 90-second piece inspired by a material from the archive.
Melanie Griffin, chair of archives and special collections, said she worked with Cyrus and the outreach archivist to pick out which collections could be inspiring for the composers. Griffin said they focused on ones with natural and built environments in Nebraska, the history of the university and student experiences.
“We tried to pick objects and collections that included a range of formats, so that students would be able to respond to written stories as well as visual stories, 3D architectural models, even a bottle of water that came from a polar ice core drilling expedition,” Griffin said.
Zgud’s piece was inspired by a collection of prints called “Book of Skies” that depict the sky at different parts of the day on one singular day.
“It’s really exciting, just to get those artistic prompts,” Zgud said. “I feel like it really helps fight writer’s block when you get a totally new prompt and you’re like, ‘Whoa, what’s gonna happen?’”
Zgud is working with a saxophonist for his piece. He said he’s excited to see it all come together.
“I think that one of the best things that art can do is bring people together,” Zgud said. “That’s something that music does. That’s something that libraries do.”
Kathryn Hardgrave, a first-year music composition master’s student, helps organize the Flyover New Music Series. She said the concerts are typically held in the music school highlighting pieces that students spend a month or several months on. However, for the Flyover Satellite Concerts that are held outside of the school, they add a challenge of having one instrument and less time to work on the piece.
“It’s a bit of an intense deadline, a quicker turnaround, but it also just sort of helps the project come to life,” she said.
Hardgrave is working on a piece for the concert that is inspired by photographs of the Sandhills from a fifth-generation Nebraskan. Hardgrave is working with a bassoon player for her piece.
“As someone who’s never actually been to the Sandhills before, it’s been really interesting learning more about the state of Nebraska and that sort of exploration,” she said. “Seeing this beautiful part of the environment I hadn’t seen before is really inspiring me to think about how to incorporate natural sounds into my work.”
Hardgrave said she hopes to find more ways to collaborate between departments and in the community.
“I think it’s cool to bring music out into the greater community and engage different people and tell different stories, and especially telling these stories that are very much like Nebraska history and Nebraska environment,” Hardgrave said. “It kind of highlights things that are special about the place we live in.”
Griffin said everyone is invited to use and find inspiration in the library archives for any kind of project or reason, like music compositions, research papers, books or just curiosity.
“What we really love to do, what I really love to do is to connect users to those materials,” Griffin said. “So we aren’t just a warehouse of books and objects, we are a place where these books and objects live and people can come in and interact dynamically with them and create new information and new sources that are inspired by the materials that we steward.”