Have you HERD? Senior Recital Coverage
By: Emmeline Wetherbee
If you didn’t know, OBU music majors have to compose their recital before they get to graduate; it’s a requirement. Elizabeth Houser hosted her senior recital in late March. Having the overall theme of Creation, she composed beautiful pieces of music.
“We can never feel closer to God as a Creator until we become a Creator,” she said after the show, and she proved that night that she is very much a creator of beautiful music.
Her recital included all kinds of different instruments. Everyone who assisted Houser in her performance did an outstanding job. You could tell these were people who had practiced and honed their craft for years. And those people who had to move the instruments around during each piece were professional and nuanced as well. If you’ve never been to a concert or recital before, then you might not know, but how the instruments are laid when the event starts is not always where they end up when the event ends. You want the person who is performing to have center stage, so sometimes that means lugging a piano from halfway around the room.
The music was amazing. She starting the concert with a piece she composed called “Graveyard Waltz.” She said she was inspired from the poem “Danse Macabre” or the dance of death. It was a beautiful song, and definitely conjured an image of two ghosts dancing around on a foggy night with moonlight glinting off them. She followed the “Waltz” with a suite called “Journey Overseas.” A suite is a group of songs that go together, thematically, and are mostly referred to as such in classical music. She included five songs that, when joined, made the audience imagine a journey crossing the sea and the perils they might find while doing so.
“I have always had a love for the ocean, so I, of course, had to write a piece inspired by its vast and endless expanse,” she said.
Her seventh piece was called “Fallen Kingdom,” and this piece was ecquisite. She followed it with “Nocturne in F# Minor,” accompanied on the piano by Mandolin Greene. This nocturne had a haunting quality that paired well with her “Graveyard Waltz.”
Her final suite was one of the most moving pieces of music I have ever heard. In a three-piece suite she called “Cast Metal Mirror,” which was based off of Job 37:16-18, a passage that speaks of God’s creation. Before playing this piece, she explained to the audience that cast metal mirrors are extremely difficult to make because you have to be very intentional and precise with every aspect. For her, this process is a metaphor with our God’s creation and with our own lives and intentions.
