By Ryan Downs

Senior Staff Writer

For about as long as she’s been a teacher on campus, Dr. Ching-Ming Cheng has performed at on-campus events for the University, and she has already made plans to do so again. This month, Dr. Cheng will perform a piano recital for the benefit of students.

Dr. Ching-Ming Cheng plans to conduct a piano recital with an emphasis on art and imagery, showcasing pieces inspired by paintings. In another sense, these pieces are those that give the impression of creating images themselves. “I would say the theme for this program is ‘use music (piano) to paint,’” Cheng said. It’s a fitting theme; the pieces she intends to use include works by Russian composers Mussorsky and Rachmaninoff and French composers Debussy and Messiaen. “These composers wrote their compositions based on the paintings they saw and wanted to create a musical ‘image’ of the painting,” Cheng said. Cheng hopes this will give students a better understanding of the links between various arts and the ways in which the visible and the audible inform and inspire one another.

Dr. Cheng’s fascination with the artistic blends between music and imagery fuels the project, leading to her use of primarily impressionist music which ranks among the more colorful personalities in music style. “Impressionist music is one of my favorite styles of music,” she said. “[It’s] best known for its colors, lightness, and the ability to generate different levels of timbres in music to create peculiar images for the listener.” In order for the audience to get a better understanding of the mindset the composers were in upon the creation of the pieces, Cheng will be displaying some of the paintings that inspired the music. Cheng, who has a long history of both solo and collaborative performances around the world including participating in the Second Chinese International Piano Competition in 2009, voiced her excitement over the event. “I really hope the audience will enjoy this journey of both visual and musical evening of some major twentieth century works,” Cheng said.

She worked as an educator at over six universities, but Cheng currently works as an associate music professor on campus. Her website can be visited at www.chingmingcheng.com  For more information on the recital and to purchase tickets, visit www.csusm.edu/vpa. The recital will last a little over an hour, with a brief intermission. It will be held at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 27 in Arts 111.