2008 Woodie Awards
Beer bongs amuse audiences with musical intonations
By: Anthony Sodd
Issue date: 4/26/07 Section: LifeStyle
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This spring's final New Music Ensemble concert featured student works in which string instruments were as likely to be beat like drums as strummed, and where horns were periodically set aside in favor of beer bongs.
Approximately 40 people showed up for director Joe Neske's last show with the ensemble. He will be replaced next fall by alumnus Duane Bridges, who received his master's degree in music composition from Webster, Neske said.
"We do anything the students are interested in doing," said Neske, who has directed about 30 concerts at Webster.
In "Fanfare for the College Man," metal horns were replaced with an ode to a modern plastic instrument found in some frat houses. The crowd erupted in laughter as Jeff Brakensiek, a junior music composition major, and David Whitwell, a sophomore music education major, came out sans horn with a couple three-foot-long green beer bongs and played their original composition.
They placed the mouthpieces from their horns into the tube end of the beer bongs and then used their hands inside of the funnel to manipulate the sound.
"Since this concert is for new ideas, I thought why not use it as an instrument," Brakensiek said about his decision to play a beer bong instead of a horn.
Whitwell said after the show the improvised instruments would be put to proper use at the after party.
"Fanfare for the College Man" was not the only piece performed with non-traditional instruments. "Audio Game," written by freshman music composition major Greg Sabo, was a piece performed on X-Box controllers. The videogame console created spacey, futuristic sounds, but it appeared to be just two people playing an X-Box. Sabo said he had taken a computer program and changed it so that when certain buttons were pressed on the controllers different sounds would come out of the speakers. There was no screen, and presumably the object of the game was to get a certain sound before going to the next level.
"I was stressing out all the way up to the show, because the program kept crashing," Sabo said. "But it worked."
All the musicians came out together to performed a chant in ancient Hawaiian called "Ka Himeni Hehena" that translates to "The Raving Mad Hymn."
During "The Sooper Soorprise," the audience was encouraged to get up and write a verb on a whiteboard while one of three guitarists tried to create an interpretation of the verb on their guitar. Guitarists did their best to do renditions of verbs like "relax," "die" and "forget."
The show was anything but dull, and full of the unexpected.
"The concert was definitely different than I thought it would be," said Layal Bouaoun, a biology major at St. Louis Community College who attended the show. "I think it showed a great variety in talents and ideas of what music is."
Approximately 40 people showed up for director Joe Neske's last show with the ensemble. He will be replaced next fall by alumnus Duane Bridges, who received his master's degree in music composition from Webster, Neske said.
"We do anything the students are interested in doing," said Neske, who has directed about 30 concerts at Webster.
In "Fanfare for the College Man," metal horns were replaced with an ode to a modern plastic instrument found in some frat houses. The crowd erupted in laughter as Jeff Brakensiek, a junior music composition major, and David Whitwell, a sophomore music education major, came out sans horn with a couple three-foot-long green beer bongs and played their original composition.
They placed the mouthpieces from their horns into the tube end of the beer bongs and then used their hands inside of the funnel to manipulate the sound.
"Since this concert is for new ideas, I thought why not use it as an instrument," Brakensiek said about his decision to play a beer bong instead of a horn.
Whitwell said after the show the improvised instruments would be put to proper use at the after party.
"Fanfare for the College Man" was not the only piece performed with non-traditional instruments. "Audio Game," written by freshman music composition major Greg Sabo, was a piece performed on X-Box controllers. The videogame console created spacey, futuristic sounds, but it appeared to be just two people playing an X-Box. Sabo said he had taken a computer program and changed it so that when certain buttons were pressed on the controllers different sounds would come out of the speakers. There was no screen, and presumably the object of the game was to get a certain sound before going to the next level.
"I was stressing out all the way up to the show, because the program kept crashing," Sabo said. "But it worked."
All the musicians came out together to performed a chant in ancient Hawaiian called "Ka Himeni Hehena" that translates to "The Raving Mad Hymn."
During "The Sooper Soorprise," the audience was encouraged to get up and write a verb on a whiteboard while one of three guitarists tried to create an interpretation of the verb on their guitar. Guitarists did their best to do renditions of verbs like "relax," "die" and "forget."
The show was anything but dull, and full of the unexpected.
"The concert was definitely different than I thought it would be," said Layal Bouaoun, a biology major at St. Louis Community College who attended the show. "I think it showed a great variety in talents and ideas of what music is."
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