Hubert at HAMU

On Monday night a sizable Fulbright contingent descended upon HAMU (the music school) to hear Hubert's latest premiere. I took a lot of pictures, but most of them were not very impressive. This was in part because whenever I used flash, the humans looked somewhat normal but the background looked like the inside of a dark mine, whereas when I turned off the flash, everyone was very blurry. It's true that Alex and Hubert are very much into blurry photos, but the rest of my readers are probably not. Or let's say that the best blurry shots in this batch would still appeal only to a very limited audience.
On the other hand, I think the shot of the entrance signage (below) is quite special and will be of strong general interest. After all, it's very important to keep tourists and dogs out of music academies.

To get to more important matters, the concert itself was excellent. Works by four composition students were performed, and to my vast relief I enjoyed all of them. Of course, I had a slight bias toward Hubert's, but I was also quite taken with the final number, by the composer whose name is obscured by bad lighting on the poster. These two were performed by a chamber orchestra, while the first piece was for mixed choir and organ, and the other was for twelve instruments.
Hubert's mother came out from Taiwan for the concert (and to explore Prague in general), and we also took along Kelly's aunt and Jesse's friend Ashley, who had timed their visits most conveniently.

In other news, this afternoon I gave a lecture on American multicultural art to Štěpanka's graduate seminar. It was something of a whirlwind tour of African-American art from Robert Duncanson to the 1970s (emphasis on the Harlem Renaissance and the 1960s-70s), the Chicano mural movement and a selection of Chicana artists, and also a few forays into 1930s regionalism, Asian American art, and recent Native American art. The latter two areas were rather briefly done as I had less on the laptop to draw from. We had some technical difficulties but the audience was attentive. As usual, I tried to direct the talk more toward art in its larger historical context since I doubt many of the American Studies or History students have a strong art-historical background.

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Prague Czech art music