The Day the Music Thrived

Graduate students Elliot Cless and Phil Acimovic are ending their final year at Tufts with a bang as they prepare for a day filled with music.

Medford/Somerville, Mass. [04.17.08] At 4:30 a.m. this Friday, while most of the campus inhabitants sleep through the last few hours before the alarm sounds, Elliot Cless and Phil Acimovic will be atop Tisch Library beginning a 24-hour musical expedition.

The two second-year graduate students are the creators of "AXIS 24," a free dawn to dawn marathon of music hosted at different campus venues throughout the day. From Distler Hall to Hotung Café, the two, along with various other departmental and student ensembles will set the day to music. Groups will include the Gamelan ensemble, Tufts Big Band and the Klezmer ensemble to name a few.

"Music is not as much of a part of everyone's daily life as it should be," Acimovic says.

Cless adds, "A lot of music is behind the scenes, like music playing in the background [at a café]. Is it really doing anything?"

After meeting in a composition class and realizing their similar taste in music, Cless, who has been studying music at Tufts since his undergraduate career, and Acimovic decided in their first year of grad school that they wanted to put together a concert for each semester, thus forming their two-man ensemble, AXIS. Concert after concert, it soon became clear that their last semester would render more than just one performance.

"We got the idea in December [2007], the night after our last concert," Cless says. "We knew we had to do something big for our last semester, so after that concert was over, we were like, 'Let's do this.' The next morning, we started inquiring in the music department on how we could make it happen."

The marathon is based on two main themes-new music and time. Each ensemble will be playing new music, which includes music from any genre that has been recently composed, and most pieces will correspond with the mood for the specific time of day.

For the full schedule of events, visit http://tufts.edu/musiccenter/events/axis24.html

"One important thing that we wanted to stress in the marathon was the idea of getting away from the real serious concert environment-people sitting behind closed doors being real quiet," Acimovic says. "We are going to have the doors open, sometimes we're outside and we will encourage participation."

One of the day's participatory events will be at 2:30 a.m., when AXIS lowers the screen in the Granoff Music Center's Distler Hall and plugs in a video gaming system, allowing people to participate in both playing games and an improvised jam session coordinated to the actions of the game.

"I want to encourage people to bring their instruments so that we have all the sounds we can imagine at our fingertips," Acimovic says.

The pair also plans to use the event to bring music to different areas of the Tufts community that normally wouldn't be involved in such an event - one example being the Eliot Pearson Children's School.

"We are going to bring instruments from the different areas of the world, like the Gamelan instruments from Indonesia and the African drums, and we are going to do an hour-long presentation showing them the instruments, telling them where they are from and playing some music for them," Cless says.

As their time at Tufts comes to an end, the pair is hoping this concert will be the starting point for a fall tour, sharing this experience around the country.

"If we can bring this kind of thing to a high school or university-we even have instruments to play on the street-to live like a true musician for a few months would be great," Acimovic says.

Throughout the process, Acimovic says the music department has been their greatest supporters.

"The music department is very encouraging of students taking the initiative and I hope this will be something that people can look to and in turn not have any fear to approach the chair or any professor with an idea and ask if it can be done."

Profile written by Kaitlin Melanson, Web Communications