By DIANE ORSON

As politicians continue to navigate the historic diplomatic thaw in relations between the U.S. and Cuba, musicians from both countries say they’re looking forward to more artistic exchange.

A bass instructor at the University of Connecticut recently brought together two Cuban musicians – one from the island, one living in New York City – for an informal concert. The two hadn’t seen each other in more than a decade.

About 50 people recently gathered in a loft in lower Manhattan, where bassist Gregg August is performing with a conga player and two singers, who are also masters of the Cuban tres: an instrument similar to the guitar, but with three sets of double strings tuned to the same pitch.

Speaking during a break, August remembers meeting tres player Juan de la Cruz Antomarchi, better known as Coto, on his first trip to Cuba in the late 1990s. “And his music and his whole personality seduced me, so to speak, musically of course,” said Coto. “And I maintained contact with him on my subsequent trips. Been back to Cuba six times total. And while I was in New York playing this music I met Pablo Moya.”

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Valley Regional High School’s Music Program continued its tradition of performance excellence during the Heritage Music Festival on April 24 and 25th in Annapolis, MD. On Thursday, April 23rd, nearly one quarter of the student body, across all 4 grades, along with directors Laura Hilton and Kevin Lam, piano accompanist Meg Gister, school nurse Cynthia Dauplaise, chaperones and parents traveled over 600 miles to compete against 12 other schools from the eastern United States. The groups included the Valley Regional High School Madmen Chorus, Women’s Consort Chorus, The Madrigal Chorus, Concert Chorus, Percussion Ensemble, Jazz Band, and Concert Band. VRHS choral and band performing groups brought home every first place award they entered from the Heritage Festival event, the only nationally accredited music festival in the country.

 

In a recital hall at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, a group of musicians got together to play Jean-Baptiste Singelée’s 1857 quartet for saxophones on some very old, very special instruments.

“This is an Adolphe Sax saxophone, from the mid-1860s,” says Robert Howe, who collects antique wind instruments. He’s also a reproductive endocrinologist and M.D. who’s now a Ph.D. candidate in music history and theory at UConn. About five years ago, it occurred to him that CT scans, X-rays and similar medical technology might also be used to examine the anatomies of antique oboes, flutes and saxophones.

“So when I received this,” Howe says, “it had had a mouthpiece with it, and the mouthpiece is early 20th century manufacture, and it plays in a particular way.”

But not at all the way Adolphe Sax — the man who invented and literally put the sax in the saxophone — heard the horn. The problem is that there are only about ten or so surviving original mouthpieces crafted by Sax. Howe wondered if the CT scan and X-ray data of these originals might help replicate new ones. Then he met Sina Shahbazmohamadi, director of imaging at UConn’s Center for Clean Energy Engineering, now an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Manhattan College in the Bronx.

“I thought, Why not transfer the data from the X-ray to the 3-D printer and copy those?” Shahbazmohamadi says. “There are several advantages to this, mainly that there would be no error during this transferring.”

The process also allowed Shahbazmohamadi to digitally remove dings, dents and cracks that existed in the originals. In addition, working from Howe’s tenor mouthpiece, Shahbazmohamadi was able to manipulate the data to create copies of alto, baritone and soprano mouthpieces that no longer existed.

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