'The Butterfly Effect'

This interdisciplinary event utilizes the Fibonacci numerical sequence as a framing device to celebrate music and physics, mathematics and visual arts, and poetry and mixed media. The performance brings together current CC faculty and students, as well as special guests, to present lectures, share written works, perform music, and even create a painting live on stage throughout the event.

“It’s not only a concert or a lecture or an exhibition; it’s a little bit of everything,” said CC Music Department Prof. Ofer Ben-Amots. “It’s going to be unique and very special, dealing with a phenomenon that is integral to nature and art and everybody’s life.”

At the center of this wide-ranging, collaborative event is a composition by Ben-Amots, who wrote “The Butterfly Effect” as part of a solo piano trilogy during the COVID-19 pandemic “as a creative response to the rare and prolonged lockdown experience.”

It began when his friend Laura Farré Rozada, a Spanish pianist and mathematician, asked Ben-Amots to compose a piece based on the Fibonacci numerical sequence. He was inspired by past readings on chaos theory.

“Linking the Fibonacci Series to the chaos numerical theory was just a short way to the Butterfly Effect metaphor: the idea that a small, almost unnoticeable motion of two gentle butterfly’s wings at one part of the world can cause – through a chain of natural events and reactions – a large explosion, a tsunami, or utter chaos at another part of the world, became intriguing to me,” said Ben-Amots.

Covid-19, he said, did exactly that when it began as a small piece of news from a village in China and then spiraled within just a few months into a worldwide public health crisis.

“This fascinating concept has been as arbitrary as it was predictable, and as the world is still trying to recover from it, the backdrop of this story-imagery idea became the conceptual basis for the composition,” he said.

Listeners will find the Fibonacci sequence “loosely integrated” into all aspects of the composition: the melodic-motivic patterns, the harmonic structure, rhythmic patterns, meter signatures, and tempo indications, as well as the number of measures or number of notes creating certain patterns.

Ben-Amots, however, urges listeners to simply “enjoy the music without focusing too much on the mathematical patterns.”

This event is free and open to the public, and it will be live streamed on YouTube and Facebook.

Performing the U.S. premiere of “The Butterfly Effect” will be pianist Susan Grace, associate chair, artist-in-residence and senior lecturer in music at CC. Other presenters and performers include Shane Burns, physics; Surbhi Bhutani, computer science; Sage Behr, literature; Zach Ben-Amots, poetry; Karen Mosbacher, visual art; and Jameel Paulin, digital art. Ryan Banagale, Director of The Arts at CC, will present opening remarks.

Everyone attending a CC Department of Music event is asked to wear a KN95 or similar filtration mask. For parking information, call the Music office at 719-389-6545. Visit www.coloradocollege.edu/music to learn more about the CC Music Department.