Tufts Music Presents ‘Erik Lindgren’s 60th Birthday Celebration Chamber A-Go-Go Concert’

The Tufts University Department of Music presents Erik Lindgren’s 60th Birthday Celebration Chamber A-Go-Go Concert in the Distler Performance Hall at the Perry and Marty Granoff Music Center on Saturday, September 27, 2014 at 7 p.m.

Tufts Alumnus Erik Lindgren (BA in Music ’76) presents a birthday celebration concert featuring original chamber works and musical novelties by Lindgren composed during the past decade for strings, woodwinds, piano, vibraphone, and percussion. The concert will be preceded at 7:00 p.m. by a screening of Michael Burlingame’s “To A Random” (1986), a 23-minute film with original unused soundtrack by Lindgren. The concert will conclude with a premier of “Dark Garden” (2013), a 20-minute live soundtrack to a film by Wu So Fai documenting Linda Huey’s large-scale sculpture installation.

As a contemporary classical composer, Lindgren has a catalog of over six dozen works, ranging from solo piano pieces to chamber music to orchestral works. During his undergraduate studies at Tufts University, Lindgren worked with T.J. Anderson, and in 1974–1975 spent his junior year abroad in London studying composition with Alfred Nieman and piano with Birgette Wild at the Guildhall School of Music. Lindgren received an MA in music composition and piano performance from The University of Iowa in 1977 where he studied with Donald Jenni, Richard Hervig, and Peter Lewis.

Since 1980, Lindgren has been a founding member of the Boston-based new music ensemble Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, which has toured internationally and recorded eleven crossover CDs mixing rock and chamber music aesthetics.

In 1978, Lindgren established Sounds Interesting Productions, a commercial recording studio and music production company. National and regional credits include original scores for all three major U.S. networks, PBS, Eastpak, the Boston Globe, Basketball Hall of Fame, Jordan Marsh, Prentice-Hall, and the Christmas Tree Shops.

For 35 years, Lindgren has run the ARF! ARF! label, which has released over six-dozen archival CDs documenting 1960s Garage/Psychedelic Rock and Outsider Music. Lindgren has also produced over one hundred records for such diverse artists as Willie Loco Alexander, the Turbines, the Cynics, and Ed “Moose” Savage and his Litany of Complaints.

In addition to this special 60th birthday concert, Lindgren is celebrating the release of Yin Yang A-Go-Go, a 2-CD “genre-smashing” career retrospective that includes musical highlights culled from his work with Birdsongs, jingles, Musique Concrete, New/No Wave, contemporary Classical compositions, corporate video soundtracks, Garage/Psychedelic/ Punk/Power Pop, Space Negros, Techno, and more.

Lindgren will also be in residence at Tufts during the week of Sept 22-27, making presentations to the Composition seminar and Music Recording & Production class, along with hosting an open rehearsal for the September 27 concert.

Additional information about Erik Lindgren can be found at his personal website at www.sfzrecordings.com.

The Granoff Music Center is located at 20 Talbot Avenue on Tufts’ Medford/Somerville campus. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, please visit as.tufts.edu/music/musiccenter or call the Granoff Music Center Box Office at 617.627.3679.

This concert has been made possible by the Granoff Music Fund.

– Information from Tufts University