A Virtuosic Journey Through the Past, Present and Future
Sigfrid Karg-Elert: Sonata Appasionata
Telemann: Fantasy #2 in A minor
Robert Dick: Piece in Gamelan Style
Robert Dick: Book of Shadows, for bass flute
Paganini: Caprice in E minor, Posato for violin
Transcribed by Robert Dick
Robert Dick: everyone@universe.existence
flutist & pre-recorded sounds, poetry Marvin Bell
Robert Dick: Time is a Two-Way Street, for two flutists
With Lisa Bost-Sandberg
Jimi Hendrix: Purple Haze, Arranged by Robert Dick

As a boy starting to play the flute in the late 1950s, I used to imagine
my flute as a spaceship. After all, it had all the cool looking keys and rods and strangely shaped metal pieces that the spaceships in my Science Fiction magazines did. The flute stand became a landing
module (a decade before the Eagle landed on the moon!) and the trill keys were rotational thrusters.But my flute had something going that no spaceship can do-it traveled through time as well as space! And now, these decades later, I’m still in the cockpit, heading out on yet another journey, fueled by a lifetime of inspiration from music and all else I’ve experienced on planet Earth.

Today’s program takes us all the way back to the 1700s with a Fantasia by Telemann, through to the 19th century heavy metal of Paganini, bounces between clouds of futuristic sounds and traditional Japanese phrases, and ends-where else?-in the future with my ever-changing version of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze.

I’m thrilled to be playing for you at the North Dakota Museum of Art and it’s my privilege to be your guide (no tipping, please!), opening the way to easily hear these wonders by introducing the pieces and talking about what happens and why, and how the music connects to us all.

Robert Dick is a musical visionary, a creative virtuoso in the tradition of Paganini and Hendrix, artists who redefined both the music and the technique of their instruments. Improvisor, composer, author, teacher and inventor, he performs worldwide. Listening to Dick play solo has been likened to the experience of hearing a full orchestra.

A central focus of my music is the idea that acoustic instruments can be treated as human-powered synthesizers, each capable of an enormous range of sonority and expression well beyond their traditional definitions. I have total faith in the ability of humans to transcend limits imposed by presupposition. As a child, I rejected the idea that the flute could only produce one note at a time and by my late teens had started to invent thousands of new sonorities. They were there for the doing, if one assumed they could exist, instead of couldn’t.

The idea of continuous transformation of timbre is very important to me, and my music is influenced by electric and electronic music, world music, natural sounds and the work of my fellow composer-performers. I try never to make pastiches but to fuse influences and create work that’s truly original.