(Story and photos courtesy the Ensemble Mik Nawooj)
The Hip-Hop Orchestra Experience is part concert, dance party, and club night featuring original music that samples from classical and hip-hop—all presented in an underground setting like the New York scene that birthed hip-hop.
In 2010, along with the artistic director, JooWan Kim, Christopher Nicholas co-founded Ensemble Mik Nawooj, who will bring the experience to Augusta University’s Maxwell Theatre at 7 p.m. April 1.
The music uniquely challenges the MCs and classical musicians pushing the boundaries of both hip-hop and concert music, creating something completely new. The program includes seminal works of Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven, deconstructed and reimagined with funky rhythms and rapid-fire rhymes, according Ensemble Mik Nawooj’s website.
Led by composer/pianist, JooWan Kim, The Hip Hop Orchestra Experience creates a brand new genre of music by sampling principles of Hip-Hop and Classical. Executed with resident MCs, a lyric soprano, woodwinds, French horns, strings, piano and drums, the music is rigorous, nuanced, accessible, and free from the dogmas of Western European concert music aesthetic, the website said.
After a successful performance of a novelty piece which featured an MC and chamber ensemble, Kim had a profound shift in the direction of his writing. He felt that he found a way out of the stifling contemporary concert music aesthetic in this new way of composition. JooWan crystallized his ideas into method sampling, a principle of borrowing or sampling of rationales from related as well as unrelated fields, then reframing them into one’s own system.
Tickets are free for AU/EGSC students and $5-$20. Click here for more information.
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