Symphony Conductor Paul Haas Composes Piece to Celebrate Fay Jones School's 70th Anniversary

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Paul Haas is music director for the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas.

FAYETTEVILLE — Paul Haas, music director for the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas, has composed a new site-specific piece of music to commemorate and celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas.

It will be presented at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 27, in Vol Walker Hall, and the performance is open to the public.

The piece, called "In saecula saeculorum" ("In Eternity"), has been in the making for about a year, ever since Dean Peter MacKeith approached Haas about creating a composition to mark the school's anniversary.

"In considering the school's 70th anniversary year, the idea of animating our home in Vol Walker Hall and the Steven L. Anderson Design Center addition with a commissioned musical composition and performance came quickly to mind," MacKeith said. "Music and architecture are fundamentally intertwined, and our building possesses superb acoustic properties in its public spaces — ones that Paul Haas and his colleagues will activate marvelously. As a school, we hope to demonstrate continuously our commitment to the arts and the sciences, and to contribute to the larger life of the university."

One of the first things that MacKeith and Haas did was walk through the building together, guided by Marlon Blackwell, the lead architect of the renovation and addition of Vol Walker Hall.

"It became clear to me immediately that this was an incredible opportunity: the building is a perfect match for my writing style, which is almost always a marriage of the old and the new," Haas said.

Haas conducted an initial research period, during which he spent many hours in the space gathering data. He concluded that three different areas of the building stood out as excellent venues for "movements" of the installation piece: the southern exterior façade, the second floor gallery (where old and new portions of the building come together) and the interior of the southwest glass-enclosed metal staircase.

Once Haas and MacKeith agreed on those spaces, the writing process began and lasted from mid-May through the end of July. Haas mocked up the acoustic of each of those performance areas on his computer, so he could work within the correct sonic environments at his home in New York. 

"Even with that mockup and all my research, though, I know from experience that the live event will be fuller, more alive, and vivid in ways I couldn't possible have imagined, and that's exciting to me," Haas said.

Because the dimensions of the spaces are more personal, Haas opted for a more "chamber" orchestration for this piece. It calls for 11 players, comprising a string quartet, five woodwinds and two trumpets. For one particular moment in the installation, echoes of the music played will emanate from six different locations in the building, projected by loudspeakers.

"I wanted to convey — in a marriage of music and architecture — the experience of a Fay Jones School student, which clearly mirrors the experience of the archetypal 'student' entering into a sacred relationship or bond with a teacher, within a hallowed setting," Haas said.

This piece has three sections, occurring in chronological order from the student's perspective: "First, as the student approaches the building, full of anticipation, while the edifice beckons; second, upon entering the building, in the thrall of the promise of learning, of unlocking mysteries; and third, tracing the journey that student in a back and forth relationship with the teacher, in that process of unlocking, of opening, of incipient mastery," Haas said.

The title of Haas' piece — "In saecula saeculorum" — quite literally means "in a century of centuries" or "in eternity."

"In so calling it, I wanted to broaden the message of the piece, to portray the Fay Jones School, its faculty and its students as a beautiful and time-bound instance of an eternal cycle: the passing on of knowledge from one generation to the next," Haas said. "In my musical language — particularly in the third movement of this piece — the listener will hear that very idea translated into music. It's an idea that has grown to mean quite a lot to me during this creative process, and I'm hopeful some of that will come across to the audience."

Admission to this public performance is free. It will begin at 5:30 p.m. outside, on the south side of the building. Find more details of the program here.

For more information, please call 479-575-4945.