Dubai Chamber Orchestra autumn concert

The Dubai Chamber Orchestra held this season's concert today at a new venue: the Centre for Musical Arts at Gold and Diamond Park. The performance hall was fairly large, but extra seats had to be brought in to accommodate the turnout. Additional venue bonus: a metro station right next door.

Conductor Barnaby Priest led the orchestra through a three-part program, consisting of Mozart's Overture to Der Schauspieldirektor, Carl Nielsen's Little Suite for Strings, and a beautiful Symphony No 99 by Haydn. A subset of the orchestra also delighted with a special performance of a collaborative artistic piece composed by Priest, featuring the littoral-themed video art and haunting countertenor talent of Janet Bellotto and Rodney Gilchrist, respectively.

10th anniversary concert of Dubai Chamber Orchestra

The Dubai Chamber Orchestra celebrated their 10th anniversary on Thursday with a special free concert at Saudi German Hospital. Convenient for me, as it's right in my neighborhood, although it was strange to walk through the corridors of a hospital to find a concert venue. Acoustically and aesthetically, the hall was actually a good one, especially considering the kind of facility for which it had been built. Air conditioning, though, was somewhat insufficient, and there were a lot of people packed in there on that rather warm night.

Conductor Barnaby Priest spoke between some of the pieces about the orchestra's operation and challenges, such as being in a place with a mostly transient population. On that note, he congratulated three musicians who had been in the orchestra from its nascency, and had them cut the orchestra's birthday cake. Clarinetist Andrea Gould joined the orchestra for the second piece, and Priest's own composition, "Needs Must" was featured as the third. The piece that sounded most thoroughly-rehearsed, though, was Dmitri Shostakovich's "Chamber Symphony Op 110a", played right after the interval. Most pieces on the program that night were somewhat somber in tone, but the modern-era Percy Grainger composition "Molly on the Shore" made for a nicely folksy end to the evening, along with the uplifting encore.

Sonic Electronic Kitchen Appliance Symphony Workshop at thejamjar

Having once been an electronics student, I jumped at the chance to do the Sonic Electronic Kitchen Appliance Symphony workshop at thejamjar this Saturday morning. The workshop was conducted by Juliana Espana Keller, a Canadian artist who is well-acquainted with sonic performance, and who happens to be a resident at Zayed University at the moment. Good for us, because this is fascinating stuff.

Somehow managing to haul myself to thejamjar early on Saturday morning after a serious DnB night, and after a quick encaffeination, I joined the other participants as we set to work putting together one of these:

It's a contact microphone. Basically, it's a standard piezo transducer component that rests on a bed of solid silicone glue in a bottle cap and is wired to an audio socket. A protective putty layer allows it to stick onto and pick up vibrations from solid objects, such as these:

It looks like a lot of random-looking kitchen utensils and appliances, but these were organized as per their ability to generate a sound that can be integrated into our orchestra.

Like Jedi padawans must create their own lightsabers to become knights, we had to construct our own contact microphones, using the above tools.

After stripping the ends off the audio cables and cutting them to size, we coat the exposed leads with lead solder.

Then we solder one end to a dismantled audio socket, which will be jacked into an amplifier and speaker.

The other end is soldered onto the leads of a piezo transducer disc.

After the soldering is done, the socket is reassembled.

Then, the cap is filled with silicone glue, and the transducer is pressed onto the glue just as it is about to seal dry.

The Fun-Tak putty is then used to seal the transducer on the glue. We had a great time using our mics to rehearse with the utensils and appliances, and I look forward to the performance at month-end.