Music department to honor 'Our World's Music' with choir concert

Jackie Pugh

mustang daily

“Our World Music” is coming to the Christopher Cohan Center at 8 p.m. Saturday as part of the Cal Poly Choirs’ annual Winter Concert.

The performance will include Cal Poly’s University Singers, PolyPhonics, barbershop groups O Snap and Wired-4-Sound, and the a capella group Take It SLO.

While the night will showcase music from around the world, the highlighted second half is an Eastern Arab Classic suite of songs dedicated to Cal Poly’s new ethnomusicology professor, Kenneth S. Habib.

“We will be singing a couple different pieces from all over the world, in different languages,” said Lana Smith, psychology senior and member of the University Singers. “We’ll be singing one song in Swahili from Africa, a Hebrew song, and a song that has no words that sounds like rain.

“But the biggest performance and the main part of the concert is an Arabic piece,” Smith said. “It’s a huge song where there’s going to be dancers and it’s to showcase a new professor (Habib), so we’ll be singing that piece and welcoming him.”

The Cal Poly Choirs, which include around 130 singers, 12 student instrumentalists and seven guest musicians, will be performing songs from countries like Africa, Japan, Argentina, Ecuador and Israel.

The Arab Music Ensemble, which has 15 members, will perform as special guests. The group was recently created by Habib, who will direct the group after the intermission with songs from world-renowned singer Fairouz.

Habib compiled the entire second half of the performance from an album by Fairouz, who he believes to be the most famous singer of the Arab world.

“There’s a history of continuously performed classical music that goes back to southern Spain, which is well-known for its intellectual and artistic production since the Middle Ages,” Habib said. Thus, the second half is a compilation of this popular form of Eastern Mediterranean music and is titled “Pieces of Andalusia: A Suite of Eastern Arab Art Music”.

The show will conclude with a traditional folk dance, a Dabka, which has 12 dancers. This ties in with the genre of Mushshah, another form unbroken art music from the Middle Ages)

“Our World’s Music” will be conducted by music professor Thomas Davis and Habib, and assisted by staff accompanist Paul Wooding.

Tickets cost $8 to $15 and are available at the Performing Arts Ticket Office 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays. To order by phone, call SLO-ARTS (756-2787).

A 10 percent discount is given to patrons who buy season tickets to four music department events through the Performing Arts Ticket office; a 15 percent discount is given on tickets to five or more events.

The concert is sponsored by the Cal Poly Music Department, the College of Liberal Arts and the Instructionally Related Activities program. For more information, contact the music department at 756-2406.