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AMHERST, Mass.—Musician Zeina Nasr ’06, a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College, will workshop three of her four original compositions during an interactive performance at 7:30 p.m. at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Monday, Nov. 5. The second in a series of Copeland Fellow events on the theme of “Art and Identity in the Global Community,” the activity is free and open to the public.
Nasr, a composer, will sing her melodies a cappella or accompany herself on piano. She will invite audience members to listen to each song as collaborators would and offer any creative insight they may have in the form of a casual discussion. “I’d like to know what they’re hearing—whether the song evokes a certain style, implies potential instrumentation, is perhaps complete as is, needs restructuring, is confusing, etc.,” she explained. “Often a song becomes impenetrable or difficult to understand after having worked on it for too long. I need fresh ears.”
Nasr graduated from Amherst in 2006 with two summa cum laude theses—one in English and one in theater and dance. She is currently based in Lebanon, the country of her birth. As a Copeland Fellow, she is studying voice in preparation for a degree program in composition and spending her time at Amherst interacting with other established artists in the colloquium, addressing cross-disciplinary interests in literature, film, theater and music.
Her performance is sponsored by Amherst’s Heidi Gilpin, associate professor of German, and Wendy Woodson, professor of theater and dance.
Each year, the Copeland Colloquium brings a group of visiting scholars and artists to Amherst as fellows. This year’s colloquium theme, “Art and Identity in the Global Community,” was proposed by a group of faculty as the outcome of cross-disciplinary discussions on “the ways in which artists and scholars are revising notions of community identity as well as aesthetic conventions in response to new developments in media and migration.” Faculty representing seven different academic departments and the Mead Art Museum joined to become sponsors and organizers of the colloquium and brought five international artists, working in a broad spectrum of media, to Amherst to work in residence for both semesters of the academic year.