Blog posting written by Andrew Ronald, Film, Photography & Visual Arts '15, FLEFF Social Media Manager, Mahopac, New York

You might have heard it while watching the climax to an action-packed movie. You might have heard it in an elegant concert hall. You might have even heard it on The X Factor.

It's intense. It's powerful. And it will move you.

This is the music of Carmina Burana.

Seamless integration between sporadic bursts of energy, rhythm, and triumph, strung together by a haunting echo in the background define this style of music. And despite how startlingly demonic the music may sound, underneath it all, there is something still enchantingly reassuring about it.

Looking up to the lyrics to one of the more popular, well-known songs "O Fortuna," reassured me of this feeling. "…hateful life first oppresses, and then soothes as fancy takes it poverty and power, it melts them like ice." The music isn't meant to be malicious or intimidating...it's meant to be didactic. There's an enlightening truth behind the cyclical nature that defines fate. Carmina Burana's music is meant to serve as a vehicle for this message.

You can hear the music for yourself on Tuesday, April 2 at FLEFF's Concert featuring these particular pieces performed live at the Whalen Center for Music.

What do you interpret after hearing this music?

Colleen Ryan
Television-Radio, Scriptwriting '12
Anthropology Minor
FLEFF Intern
Lansing, NY

It's an interesting experiment when you take a bunch of students unfamiliar with the music school, and have them try to find a room hidden in the corner.  Although many of us FLEFF interns are out our element tonight here in Whalen, we're all here for a common purpose: A behind the scenes look into "The Concert for Microtopias"

I can't express how excited I am for FLEFF week. 

Not only will the concert in Hockett Hall at Ithaca College the Tuesday (March 27th) of FLEFF be an amazing spectacle, but it will be an awe-inspiring event where great minds and performers have come together to combine many works of art from music to acting to on the fly image processing.

It's "The Concert for Microtopias", a concert thinking in ways of bringing people together over something joyful.

Dr. Zimmerman told the interns that many of the people involved with the performance are those "who push the envelope and go intellectually and emotionally farther than they have ever gone before."

I can't wait to see how all these elements come together.