Guitar professor presents concert with graphic novel elements

From a dark stage, vibrant collages fill the auditorium as acoustic music wafts through the air, accompanied by a haunting tale of exploration, interchange and evolution. Two voices sing to each other, telling many different, opposing perspectives – explorer and islander, man and woman, old and new.

The Faculty Chamber Music Series will present guitar professor Peter Yates in a concert called “Guitar with Voice and Strings” on Thursday in Schoenberg Music Building’s Jan Popper Theater. The recital will feature a series of acoustic performances, followed by Yates’ multimedia performance of “The Egg and the Seed.” Described as a “comic-book oratorio,” Yates said the piece will juxtapose projected images with a live musical performance in the style of a graphic novel.

The first version of this piece debuted 15 years ago. Since then, it has changed, with one version involving Yates using a recorded soundtrack playing along with the images. However, he said that Thursday’s rendition is brand new. Yates will sing and play the guitar and will be joined by UCLA alumni – vocalist Alexandra Grabarchuk, mandolinist Buzz Gravelle and guitarist Walter Marsh.

“That piece is a real adventure,” Marsh said. “It’s a real roller coaster ride – shifting time signatures, shifting tempi, with the two voices singing these wonderful texts by Yates. … It’s poignant, it’s funny, and it’s pretty virtuosic. It’s a lot of fun to play, and it has been a really fun project to put together.”

“The Egg and the Seed” describes the age of exploration in Polynesia in the 18th century, Yates said, with European explorers arriving in the islands and interacting with the islanders. He got the idea for the piece over the course of many years, inspired partially by the cyclical nature of human interaction throughout history. The explorers and islanders are depicted the way the other sees them, and the piece will describe the intercourse between the two.

“The content of the piece has to do with all kinds of intercourse, meaning connection, mixing, seeking, sighting, touching, merging and sort of gestating and emerging from this cycle,” Yates said.

Yates created depictions of these interactions by making large collages the size of windows. He said the collages involved a lot of flowing, tropical, Polynesian imagery, which he cut out of magazines and glued together, before photographing them and creating a slideshow.

UCLA alumnus Alan Berman, who is a frequent collaborator of Yates’, will control the slides on cue to the music. Berman said there is a lot of material to view in the piece, and it is hard to absorb it all in a single viewing.

“There are over 240 or so slides. There are a lot of cues and a lot of changes, so it’s a very busy environment visually,” Berman said.

The slides make the piece interesting to the reader, Berman said, which allows all the jokes and puns in the narrative to be carried out. Yates’ lyrics may be innocent enough, he said, but in context with the slide, they become humorous or a play on words.

The recital will also feature performances by Marsh and Gravelle as well as violin professor Movses Pogossian and professor of voice Juliana Gondek. With pieces from Bach, Piazzolla and Handel interspersed with new compositions, Yates said the night will vary greatly in musical genres and eras.

“I like to mix it up,” Yates said. “We go straight from the 18th century to a brand new piece, to a tango, to a brand new piece. I like a lot of variety like that. As long as it works.”