The Particles Of Music

New concert series begins at Fenix Fayetteville

Art, music and science converge at Fenix Fayetteville today in the first show of the gallery’s new music series Sonic Images. Acclaimed guitar player Jake Hertzog will perform his rich soundscape titled “Well Lit Shadow” — a musical exploration of particle collisions and the images produced by our measurements of them.

“I tend to always be hearing music in my head about whatever is going on during the day or whatever I’m looking at,” Hertzog says with a chuckle. “But with this particular project, I was thinking, ‘If these particles clashing together could make a sound, what would that sound be?’ So I was just messing around on the guitar, making weird noises by myself, and I [realized] this should be solo guitar music because the whole experience feels lonely to me. Everything about dealing with tiny little particles seems to me very, very intimate. These are the smallest things that we are aware of that exist, so I wanted to make this my smallest [musical] unit, which is one guitar playing.”

“His stuff is so visual in this concert — to have the visuals and a video of particle collisions, it’s just amazing,” says series presenter Jeannine Parham of Hertzog’s multimedia performance. “To have music that’s inspired by that is a very kind of heady thing to have in an art gallery. So it’s a musical concert was a strong visual component. And that’s what I’m really excited about, because his concert embraces science, art and music — and dance if you consider the particle collisions movement. The idea [for the series] is to get artists from various disciplines hanging out together and bringing their audiences to each other’s audiences. So it’s this cross-pollination.”

The name for the series — Sonic Images — was born of Parham’s ideas on the vibrational qualities of music.

“We can hear the vibrations in music, and you can see them in art. But it’s the same science behind it,” she explains. And with that inspiration, there is, perhaps, no more fitting musician to open the series than Hertzog.

“These kind of projects are really fun, and they’re artistically satisfying, but they demand a certain kind of presentation to bring the audience into the fold,” Hertzog shares. “Pairing something this abstract with visuals to me was always the goal because the original inspiration for this music was very visual, and I wanted the audience to experience what I experienced when I look at those and think about it.”

Courtesy photo Critically acclaimed guitarist, composer and educator Jake Hertzog will perform his concept project, “Well Lit Shadow,” tonight at Fenix Fayetteville to open the new music series Sonic Images. This performance will be the first time Hertzog has performed the work in its entirety.