Audience receptive to professor’s music

Zack Sparks

Michael Kallstrom, a professor of music at Western, performed some of his own works in a recital in the fine arts center on Tuesday.

Bowling Green senior Jason Ausbrooks attended the concert to support Kallstrom, his former teacher.

“I really liked how he incorporated elements of classical music with electronics,” Ausbrooks said.

The evening began with a piece titled “Crystallomancy.”

The work, composed in 1988, featured a video made by Kallstrom’s brother that tied in with the theme of the piece.

The video had visuals made from, as Kallstrom said to the crowd before starting the piece, “a fish aquarium…and does anyone remember a Commodore 64 computer?”

Characterized by electronic effects and melodies that danced around Kallstrom’s rich bass voice, the piece was well-received by the crowd.

Next in the performance were excerpts from what is to be Kallstrom’s fifth entry into his “Electric Opera” series “Tell Me Your Name.”

Kallstrom said the motivations for many of the songs in “Tell Me Your Name” were drawn from many cultures’ stories about the creation and the end of the world.

Following a brief intermission, Kallstrom, with the accompaniment of Heidi Pintner on flute and Donald Speer on piano, performed “Souls and Sounds,” a piece that was commissioned by the Music Teacher’s National Association and the Kentucky Music Teacher’s Association.

The crowd was very receptive of Kallstrom’s works.

Bowling Green sophomore Corey Bryson attended the concert. He said he enjoyed the show and found Kallstrom’s influences interesting.

“He always enjoys old tonality, but he’s still a very progressive artist,” Bryson said.

Elizabethtown sophomore Tom Wimsatt said he enjoyed “Crystallomancy.”

“It was like a cross between a symphony and ‘A Clockwork Orange,'” he said.

Reach Zack Sparks at [email protected].