MURFREESBORO — The
husband-and-wife music duo of Mark Rimple and Julie Ferris ended the MTSU
Honors College fall lecture series on a high note Monday (Nov. 25) with a
special concert following a presentation by Rimple.
An hourlong concert featured Rimple playing the lute — a
pineapple-shaped stringed instrument — and Murfreesboro native Ferris singing
soprano, entertaining an audience assembled in the Paul W. Martin Sr. Honors
Building amphitheater.
“We gave a recital of music that’s about the soul, but about
a rational ordered soul from the Renaissance and Middle Ages,” Rimple said of
the concert.
The recital, titled “Beauté Parfaite” (perfect beauty), tied
in to the fall lecture series theme of “Beauty.”
When asked how his musical concept of beauty tied into the
lecture series, Rimple said, “So beauty, originally in this sort of
Renaissance/medieval and back to antiquity … in that mindset, beauty is
rational, ordered. It’s a reflection of an ordered universe, of a cosmos that’s
tuned to the same ratios as the human soul and that music is a reflection of
that.”
“Whereas,” he added, “in the Expressionist period in the 20th
century, the idea is that what’s in the soul is a glimpse of another world we
can’t understand logically. It’s something that’s much more wild and untamed
and, in a way, not mathematically analyzable.”
Rimple, professor of music theory at West Chester University
in Pennsylvania, brought art, music and historical perspective to his
presentation.
Rimple’s lecture, titled “Returning the Soul: Concepts of
Beauty in Expressionist Music, Art and Literature,” primarily was for MTSU
students taking the fall lecture series class, but also was open to the public.
The professor of music theory at West Chester University in
Pennsylvania said his lecture was on “use of the soul, (and) reason for
artistic innovation around 1912.
Rimple utilized a PowerPoint featuring artwork and music,
and seemed to captivate his audience with his knowledge of history and
delivery.
Alex Duross, sophomore English and psychology double major
from Murfreesboro, had a full appreciation of Rimple’s perspective.
“When you listen to somebody and the way they speak is so
intelligent, there’s such a love and understanding of what they do,” said
Duross, who typed in notes on her laptop from Rimple’s talk.
“In the 21st century and 2013, we think that the
ideas of circumventing boundaries, of rejecting order, of living the moment,
that those are ours,” Duross added. “The millennials, the generation before us,
that’s what we bring to the table is rejecting everything that everyone else
ever came up with; but it’s not because the world is both ordered and abstract,
and these thoughts and these ponderings and this art are not something new.
It’s very old.”
Rimple and Ferris presented love
songs from Machaut’s “Remede de Fortune” and
from the lute ayre collections of
Thomas Campion, John Dowland, Francis Pilkington and Alfonso Ferrabosco, a
collaborator in Ben Jonson’s masques.
Ferris’s father, Norman Ferris, who served on the MTSU
history faculty for 35 years before retiring in 1997, and several other family
members attended the lecture and concert.
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