RADIANT INNER LIGHT
MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE
  Yehuda Yannay and Stephen Pevnick

Haggerty Museum of Art
January 15,  2000

Credits:
 

Yehuda Yannay, voice, projected calligrams, wall calligrams
Hal Rammel, musical saw
Andy Blochowiak/Maxon Day/Josh Schmidt, percussion and harmonica
Marie Mellott/ Maxine Banks, projections
Pavel Burda, percussion fountain

Josh Schmidt, project coordination and consulting
Marie Mellott, slide photography, wall calligrams display design and
construction
Raoul Deal/ Jason Pogo, display finishing

Triolins were design and built by Hal Rammel
Harry Bertoia sculptures are from the collection  of the Haggerty Museum of Art
 

Yehuda Yannay, composer, conductor and professor of music theory, and Stephen Pevnick, artist and designer, join forces challenging traditional notions of music, instrumentation and visual presentation in Radiant Inner Light,an exhibition of the contemporary instruments inspired by medieval Jewish prototypes and the rich traditions behind them.

Unlike conventional instruments, these custom-built percussion pieces are created out of such common hardware as rings, sockets, springs, saw blades, and a wheel. Carefully calibrated, they produce rich metallic sounds symbolizing, for the artists, the Divine Light as described in the seventeenth century by Naftali Bacharach and derived from the mantra-like meditations of the thirteenth-century mystic, Abraham Abulafia. In similar fashion, Stephen Pevnick's water chime fountain harnesses the musical potential of water droplets in a dazzling display of technology, light, energy, sound, and motion.

The various instruments, consisting of the water chimes, bells, and flexitone or string instruments, are shown together with handwritten calligrams. These artistic renderings of the 22-letter Hebrew alphabet produced by Yannay and mounted by the visual artist Marie Mellott are a part of a spiritual tribute to the ancient Jewish culture and tradition. Inspired by medieval Hebrew Kabbalistic evocations of the Divine Light and mantras created of Hebrew letter combinations, Radiant Inner Light and the instruments that produced this musical piece offer a fresh approach to traditional Judaic music.

In staging Radiant Inner Light,Yannay and Pevnick collaborated with soloist Hal Rammel and Music from Almost Yesterday in two multi-media performances on January 15 and February 5, 2000, 7 p.m. at the Museum. These events marked Yehuda Yannay's second major concert at the Haggerty Museum of Art. In May 1994, the Haggerty held a concert of contemporary chamber music composed by Yannay in a retrospective of his musical contributions. Stephen Pevnick's work appeared in the exhibition Wisconsin Artists: A Celebration of Jewish Presence at the Haggerty Museum April 7 - June 12, 1994.

Annemarie Sawkins
Associate Curator

Yehuda Yannay

Yehuda Yannay was born in Romania and emigrated to Israel in 1951. He is a graduate of the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv, Brandeis University and holds a doctorate from the University of Illinois in Champaign -Urbana. A winner of many international and national awards, Yannay served as Fulbright guest conductor at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Stuttgart and Hamburg. In 1970, he was appointed Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Yannay is a prolific and versatile composer, conductor and media artist whose work includes music for orchestra, live electronic and synthesizer pieces, environmental compositions, film, music-theater, and a large body of vocal and chamber music pieces.  In recent years, Yannay's works have been performed by prominent soloist, ensembles and orchestras from Taipei to Bucharest. He has been honored by the International Music Festival in Timisoara, Romania and the Hungarian Film Institute with retrospectives of his work.

Stephen Pevnick

Born in St. Louis in 1944, Stephen Pevnick is a multimedia artist and designer whose fascination with water, electronics, mechanic and kinetics have earned him numerous awards. In 1983, Pevnick (a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis) won a Design Excellence Award from the Industrial Designers Society of America for a programmable free falling water droplet fountain. Pevnick received a research grant from the Kohler Company for his innovative work in developing a 6,912 nozzle linear fountain. One of his programmable water installations was exhibited at the 1996 Summer Olympics and at the International Art exposition at Navy Pier, Chicago. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Pevnick and Yannay have collaborated on a chamber opera entitled All Our Women and together they created Wind Suck, a sound sculpture based on vacuum pumped air.