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NJIT Research Professor Herbert Tate Heads Panel Discussion for Governors Group
Architect School at NJIT Offers Again Popular Two-Day Summer Career Program
New Jersey Network for Women Leaders in Higher Education Spring 2002 Workshop
NJIT and American Water Works Association Form New Research Center to Improve Drinking Water
New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame at NJIT Inducts Four Members; Fetes Others
New NJIT Degrees Benefit Students, Technology Industries and New Jersey
NJIT Featured Talent
Announcing the publication of a new book and CD:
SUDDEN MUSIC:
Improvisation, Sound, Nature
by David Rothenberg
"Music," said Zen patriarch Hui Neng, "is a means of rapid transformation." It takes us home to a natural world that functions outside of logic, where harmony and dissonance, tension and release work in surprising ways. Weaving memoir, travelogue, and philosophical reflection, Sudden Music presents a musical way of knowing that can closely engage us with the world and open us to its spontaneity.
Improvisation is everywhere, says David Rothenberg, and his book is a testament to its creative, surprising power. Linking in original ways the improvised in nature, composition, and instrumentation, Rothenberg touches on a wide range of music traditions, from Reb Nachman's stories to John Cage's aleatory. Writing not as a critic but as a practicing musician, Rothenberg draws on his own extensive travels to Scandinavia, India, and Nepal to describe from close observation the improvisational traditions that inform and inspire his own art.
The accompanying audio disc features eleven original compositions by Rothenberg, none of which have been previously released on CD. Included are a duet with clarinet and white-crested laughing bird, and another duet with clarinet and Samchillian TipTipTip Cheeepeeeee, an electronic computer instrument played by its inventor, Leon Gruenbaum. Also featured are multicultural works blending South Indian veena and Turkish G-clarinet with spoken text from the Upanishads; a piece commissioned by the Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival with readings of texts by E. O. Wilson accompanied by clarinet and electronics; and improvisations based on Tibetan Buddhist music, Japanese shakuhachi music, and the image of a black crow on white snow.
Sudden Music will help all readers experience the world as a musical place, full of wonderful events that come out of nowhere to create a strange and rhythmic harmony.
David Rothenberg is a philosopher, musician, and writer. His essays have appeared in Parabola, The Nation, Wired, Whole Earth Review, Sierra, and Escape. Rothenberg's five CDs, on which he plays clarinet, include Before the War and Bangalore Wild. His many books include Hand's End: Technology and the Limits of Nature and Blue Cliff Record: Zen Echoes. He is an associate professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
NJIT Talent Search
We're looking for a few interesting staff and faculty members for human interest stories. If you have artistic, theatrical, musical, or other unusual achievements beyond your professional aspirations, many people inside and outside this university may want to hear about them.
For instance, are you a physicist who writes science fiction novels? An engineer who plays the clarinet in pubs? An artist getting oil paintings ready for a show?
Do tri-state antique dealers know you on a first-name for your 19th century silverplate collection? Or perhaps, you've been appearing for years in regional theaters, winning ballroom dance competitions, or lecturing on Somalian cooking?
Tell us, so we can tell each other, about the remarkable people who work and teach at NJIT.
Email details to public relations director Sheryl Weinstein (sheryl.m.weinstein@njit.edu).
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