Luminescence Project will be ‘ensnaring hate’

People commemorate the April 4, 1958, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in many different ways, including candlelight vigils and rallies.\nFor the 40th anniversary of King’s death, the IU Luminescence Project, a group that creates a multi-sensory experience with classical music, will present “Ensnaring Hate,” a three-part choral performance, at 6:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday in Musical Arts Center 301. The performance is free and open to the public.\nMark Doerries, a doctoral conducting student and the production’s conductor and artistic director, said the group hopes to make classical music more engaging to the average audience by creating a multi-sensory performance.\n“It’s a new style of performance that we’re trying that activates the eyes and the ears ... and the emotions, hopefully,” he said.\nThe relatively close quarters of the room should help bring the audience into the performance.\nDoerries said they’re “staging it in the round,” which means the audience will be on all sides of the performance.\nSoloist Abigail Mitchell said that despite the challenge, the experience has been rewarding because it is so different from anything else she’s done.\n“This is not your typical concert where you sit in the audience and they sing at you,” she said. “It’s not just a concert, it’s not just music and it’s certainly not just about the music.”\nThe evening will begin with Harald Svensson’s “I-A-O,” in which the Project will combine its choir’s singing with electronic multimedia, Doerries said. \n“The idea is that you hear repeating patterns of music and over that are the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X,” he said, adding that the text the choir will sing is gibberish. \nThe group will then move to the evening’s centerpiece, “And They Lynched Him on a Tree,” composed by William Grant Still in 1940. The piece is written for a double chorus, and the two parts are identified as “White Crowd” and “Negro Men and Women.” \nBass David Villanueva will narrate the tale of a young black man in the South whose life sentence was not enough for certain white people in the community, who lynched the man. The piece opens with the “White Crowd” discussing what it has just done, followed by the mourning “Negro Men and Women,” including the dead man’s distraught mother, performed by soloist contralto Xan Jennings.\nFor the finale, soprano Mitchell will perform Thomas Jennefelt’s “Stimoli Volio.”\n“It’s essentially a woman crying over and over again ... it’s very, very moving,” Doerries said, adding that it is in part an extension of “And They Lynched Him on a Tree,” which ends with the grief-stricken wailing of the dead man’s mother. “It’s left up to the audience to decide what the story actually is that she’s telling.”\nMitchell, a first-year master’s student, said the text she will sing, though gibberish, is intended to sound like Latin.\n“Yes, come for the music, because the music’s great, but also come for the message,” she said. “It’s been very moving for me and I hope it will be very moving for the audience.”