OSU Alumni Association
2009 Winter Term
Arts Strand
Fun with Boomwhackers
Thursday, Jan. 8, 1:30
Enjoy a session of exploring Boomwhackers, tuned percussion tubes — much like a modern version of
the marimba — that everyone and anyone can use to instantly create music. Suzannah Doyle is a
composer, performer, on-the spot songwriter whose work appears in Piano Dreams: the Movie, and has
been licensed and used worldwide in commercials, TV & Radio shows, DVDs, documentaries and
corporate projects. She will explore general sound play, making chords of sounds (similar to how a
marimba band works), and play "name that tune" and "Hmmm, I wonder if THAT song could be played on
Boomwhackers." She believes that music belongs to everyone — not just the professionals — and that everybody
has music inside of them.
Host: Erika Schoell
Computer-Generated Art
Thursday, Jan. 15, 1:30
Richard Helmick, Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri and an early practitioner of
computer art, will present an illustrated overview of computer-generated art (algorithmic art)
from its earliest days to the present. The lecture will include a discussion of the dilemmas that
have arisen within the arts community regarding what is acceptable when a computer has been
involved in the process of generating art.
Host: Glenn Theodore
Inherit the Wind
Thursday, Jan. 22 & 29, 1:30
Art Bervin, retired English teacher at LBCC, will lead a session featuring the film (and drama) Inherit the
Wind. We will view a shortened DVD version of the film, followed by a time for questions and discussion. At
a second class session on Inherit the Wind, a selected panel will respond to the scientific, legal, and literary
issues raised by both the film and the Scopes trial upon which the play was based.
Host: Brookes Spencer / Art Bervin
Culinary Arts and Water Colors
Thursday, Feb. 5, 1:30
A local success story, Jan Roberts-Dominguez’ passions for writing,
painting, cooking, and hiking have merged into a dream career; one
that includes glorious stretches of time in all of these separate
loves. The outcome? An award-winning food writer (Jan has
written/illustrated for the Corvallis Gazette-Times since 1983; a
syndicated column, Fresh Approach, since 1985; and four — going
on five — cookbooks.), and an artist, whose food-related and
wilderness-inspired landscapes have found their way into collections
throughout the country. Most recently, Jan has broadened her
culinary art to include food and wine pairings. Jan will share
interesting and irreverent tales about her food-related adventures,
rants about food and wine snobbery, the perils of merging full-time
careers in art and journalism, the joys of working from a home office
where she’s confessed to conducting phone interviews in her
jammies. There will be plenty of tips on cooking and painting, and she’ll wind it up with a small,
educational discussion on food and wine pairing.
Host: Glenn Theodore
Shakespeare Name Code in the Sonnets
Thursday, Feb. 12, 1:30
Peter Jensen, Instructor of English at Linn-Benton Community College and author on
Shakespeare, will describe his discoveries of Shakespeare's use of a standard Elizabethan spy
service substitution code in Will's Sonnets to name the poet, the youth, the dark lady, and the
rival poet. This level of text analysis may prove a breakthrough in Shakespeare studies. Jensen
will read from the Sonnets (for St, Valentine's Day) and will speak with a PowerPoint slide show
to explain many examples and answer questions.
Host: Art Bervin
Opera: Disease, Death and Desire
Thursday, Feb. 19, 1:30
Angela Carlson, pianist and instructor in the OSU Music Department, returns to continue her audio/visual
presentations developing themes taken from the world of Opera.
Host: Brookes Spencer
Music in the Twentieth Century: New Directions II
Wednesday, Feb. 25, 1:30
David Eiseman, OSU Professor Emeritus of Music, will discuss how the turn into
the 1900s through the following few decades denoted change and new directions of
all sorts: expressionism, impressionism, primitivism, nationalism, along with other
isms. Through excerpts by Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky, we will come
to appreciate how impressionism, symbolism, and primitivism represent directions
very different from that of German expressionism during this time of artistic and
intellectual turbulence before and after WW I. (The topic in Spring 2009 term will
be nationalism.)
Host: Brookes Spencer
Benton County Historical Museum Collections Care Facility Tour
Thursday, March 5, 1:30
A behind-the-scenes tour of the Museum's new 13,500 sq. ft. Collections Care Facility on the
Philomath campus. The Horner Collection, formerly housed in the basement of Gill Coliseum
in the Horner Museum on the OSU campus, is now owned by the Society. This state-of-the-art
facility was designed to hold all three-dimensional objects of both collections, numbering
60,000 artifacts. Meet for tour in front of Philomath College building at 1101 Main Street,
Philomath at 1:30 PM.
Host: Erika Schoell
George S. Kaufman: The Great Collaborator
Thursday, March 12, 1:30
In the first part of the twentieth century, George S. Kaufman was the Dean of Broadway
comedy. He and his collaborators wrote some of the biggest hits: Merton of the Movies,
Animal Crackers, The Royal Family, June Moon, Dinner at Eight, Of Thee I Sing, Once
in a Lifetime, You Can't Take It With You, and The Man Who Came To Dinner. Kaufman
scholar, Robert Leff, will present an overview of Kaufman's career as playwright and
director and show scenes from the plays, plus scenes from the movie Kaufman wrote for
The Marx Brothers, A Night At The Opera.
Host: Lois Courtney