World-premiere performance of mandolin sonata slated Thursday, streaming available

Gallatin County musician and composer Ben Fuhrman will perform various works on solo mandolin — including masterpieces by J.S. Bach and an original sonata — on Thursday, Sept. 17. The concert will be archived on YouTube.

Fuhrman, an assistant professor of music technology at MSU, composed the four-movement sonata using a mix of tonality and atonality. The composition reportedly features advanced techniques such as the playing of two different notes at once on a single course — called "split-string fretting" — and the production of bell-like, chiming tones known as "harmonics."

Fuhrman also will perform Bach pieces, including a fugue in C minor and the fifth movement of the Partita in D minor.

The partita's fifth movement is in a form called “chaconne” and is known the world over simply by that title — “The Chaconne,” having been transcribed for many instruments and ensembles over the centuries. The Chaconne, written with the virtuoso in mind, was originally composed for Baroque solo violin and is one of the most famous works ever written, exploring a wide range of emotional states over about 14 minutes. Of this piece, composer Johannes Brahms once wrote, in a letter to Clara Schumann: “On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind."

Fuhrman is a member of Celtic Collective Bozeman, a band that is influenced by Gaelic musical cultures from Ireland and Scotland along with Iberian and Nordic traditions. More about the group, which has three more performances in Gallatin County this month, can be found at https://celticcollectivebozeman.org/.

Fuhrman often can be found playing Celtic music on fiddle and mandolin of a Sunday afternoon at an open Celtic jam session at Valhalla Meadery in Bozeman. The session, frequented by area acoustic musicians and lovers of traditional Irish music, is the only one of its kind in Gallatin County; other Celtic sessions exist in Billings and Missoula.  

Thursday's concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. at the Reynolds Recital Hall in Howard Hall, 11th Avenue, across from the duck pond.

Tickets are $15 for general admission and $5 for MSU students. Children up to age 12 are admitted for free. Tickets are available at https://www.montana.edu/music/tickets/tickets.html.

The event will be streamed live for free and archived on MSU’s YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@montanastatemusic/featured.