Feb. 22, 2007
Guitarist
Gary Lucas to Appear at Two Live Events at RSU March 7
Grammy Award-nominated guitarist and songwriter Gary Lucas will
perform live at two music and film events on Wednesday, March 7, at
Rogers State University.
Lucas will perform the music he composed for the historic 1920 silent
film "The Golem" during a showing of the film from 12 noon to 2 p.m.
in the Will Rogers Auditorium on the RSU campus in Claremore. He also
will give a solo concert at 7 p.m. in the auditorium. Both events are
free and open to the public. His appearances are part of the RSU
Department of Communications and Fine Arts Invited Speaker Series.
Based in New
York, Lucas is internationally known as a singer, songwriter and
composer, in addition to headlining his long-standing band "Gods and
Monsters." He has been called "the thinking man's guitar hero" by the
New Yorker magazine and has written popular songs for Jeff Buckley and
Joan Osborne, among others. Rolling Stone magazine said he is "one of
the best and most original guitarists in America."
His music
for the classic silent 1920 German Expressionist film "The Golem,"
written in collaboration with his childhood friend, keyboardist and
composer Walter Horn, premiered in1989 at the American Museum of
Moving Image in Astoria, N.Y., as a commission for the Brooklyn
Academy of Music Next Wave Festival.
"A seamless
sonic web of themes and improvisations composed for electric and
acoustic guitars and synthesizers," the project was immediately hailed
by EAR Magazine as the evening's "Best Work."
Since then,
he and Gary Walter (who used to have a "combo" together going back to
playing elementary school assemblies in 1963 in their hometown of
Syracuse, N.Y.) have performed together at sold-out performances at
the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis in 1990, at John Zorn's Radical
Jewish Culture Festival in Munich, Germany, in 1992, and at the
Knitting Factory in New York City in 1995, among many other shows.
Lucas
prepared the critically acclaimed solo guitar version of the score for
the film, which he has subsequently performed in over 15 countries all
over the world.
The film, which carries the full title of "The Golem and How He Came
Into the World," tells the story of an actual historical Rabbi,
Jehufah Loew, who legend has his fashioned a man from clay in
16th century Prague to save the Jewish community from annihilation. It has
been filmed many times as well as adapted in many other mediums, but
this 1920 version is considered the definitive one.
A forerunner
of the Frankenstein series, the movie dovetails with his lifelong
interest in horror flicks and the macabre. He founded a midnight movie
society called "Things That Go Bump in the Night" while at Yale
University in the early 1970s.