Allen Anderson and Brooks de Wetter-Smith premiere ICEBLINK

IAH Fellows Allen Anderson and Brooks de Wetter-Smith performed the original sight and sound composition ICEBLINK to a full theater at the NC Museum of Natural Science on April 27.

ICEBLINK is a multi-media arts performance based on the photography of UNC music Professor de Wetter-Smith who journeyed to the Antarctic Peninsula in December 2006. He traveled aboard the National Geographic Ship Endeavor which braved forty foot waves and 70 mile per hour gales in navigating the Drake Passage. De Wetter-Smith, an award winning flutist and accomplished photographer, who is also the James Gordon Hanes Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, took hundreds of pictures in this  beautiful, remote, other worldly locale inhabited only by “seals, penguins, whales and other ocean life.”

Allen Anderson, a UNC Music Professor and a composer himself, wrote the score that accompanied the evolving collage of images selected by de Wetter-Smith from his work. The music is in seven parts and is 45 minutes in length. It was performed by the five member UNC Chamber Ensemble, joined by Brooks on the flute. The score employs a modernist form that complements and reflects the images. The composition also draws inspiration from poetry about Antarctica by Sara Vial and Pablo Neruda as well as a passage from the Book of Job associated with the ill-fated Shackleton Expedition of 1914-16.

According to the program notes, “ICEBLINK…is a meditation on Antarctica—the color, the expanse and shape, the time and change of and the life. It is about what is real and imagined. It is about the unfamiliar and the extreme. It is about Antarctica as a real place and as an interior space, the psychological edge of the world.”

David Kiel, an IAH staff member who attended the performance, said the program “was really two extraordinary symphonies at once—one for the eye and one for the ear—and they worked together to create one very moving performance.”

Ultimately the piece will be put into a format and made available to schools by other educational, environmental and conservation organizations. The project is intended to have a wide range of artistic, social, and environmental meanings and uses.

John McGowan, Director of the IAH, said “the Institute is very proud to be associated with and to support this kind of work. It is innovative and demonstrates the power and value of a multi-disciplinary approach. It meets the highest artistic standards, and it shows a connection to the world on both the level of appreciation and of caring. It will have impact and benefit well beyond the academic audience.”

De Wetter-Smith put the images together while on an IAH Fellowship and the project was made possible by a broad partnership of UNC and community organizations. These included Raleigh Chamber Music Guild, the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, the NC Arts Council, Lindblad National Geographic, Canon USA, and Southeastern Camera. At UNC travel and project expenses were supported by grants from the Music Department, the University Research Council, the IAH, the College of Arts And Sciences, and the Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence.

 
*Many of the quotes and facts about ICEBLINK in this article are derived from the program notes