The Language of Music: More Than What Meets the Ear
By Komal Makhdoom
April 30, 2006

On a breezy summer evening, a number of well-dressed parents and students walk the stairs to the Burruss Hall Auditorium. They hand their tickets to the usher and find their way into the concert hall.

So far it’s been easy. Ladies in dresses and gents in dress pants; everyone looks like they knew the steps in preparing for a formal concert.

Once seated in the auditorium, the drill is still pretty easy. Everyone turns off their cell phones and pulls out their programs. Some even put a finger over their mouths to warn their neighbour, in case he or she didn’t know the quiet rule.

The orchestra appears, and with it come the familiar sounds of violins, a grand piano, drums and a cello. The audience nods in reassurance. This part is easy too; after all, everyone knows what a piano sounds like, right?

The guests sit back and listen to the melodies. Some close their eyes and sink into the mood. They take comfort in the understanding that that’s what a concert sounds like.

But out of nowhere comes the sound of a screeching tire. The audience is alarmed, some even scared. “Where’s the accident?” a concerned voice from the crowd shouts, knowing that the sound of burning rubber cannot possibly be a musical note. Or can it?

In the words of a young Croatian composer, “If you take a sound and strip it of its meaning, that sound is no longer that of the screeching tire, it’s just a sound. Like notes from a cello or a piano, it stands by itself.”

This Croatian composer works with the appreciation of sound for a living. He does it right next to us everyday in Squires Student Center. Multimedia composer and performer Ivica Ico Bukvic has now been a part of the Virginia Tech Department of Music for about four months.

After completing his Doctorate in Musical Arts from the University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music in 2005, Bukvic joined the Virginia Tech faculty as an assistant professor in music composition & technology this year. He also applies his integrative music skills as faculty in the Virginia Tech Collaborative for Creative Technologies in the Arts and Design (CCTAD).

A true artist at heart, Bukvic says his job is best described as the conversion of a computer into a musical instrument. His Introduction to Music Technology course, he says, is an outlet for him to show young students a side of music they may not have been familiar with at this point.

“I seek integration of technology with art in such a way that it addresses as many sensory perceptions as possible,” Bukvic says. His music ranges from a diverse list of genres covering acoustic, electronic, interactive, and various modified forms of contemporary music.

“Aesthetically speaking,” Bukvic says, “my music is all over the place.” A casual hearing of a mere sample of Bukvic’s compositions proves this statement true. The changing rhythms, the integration of voice, the random beats; a one-word summation of Bukvic’s sounds would be the term “different.”

“I know that students don’t necessarily agree with the aesthetics presented to them in class,” he says. “But the very fact that they have learned to appreciate it makes all the difference.”

Bukvic says there is more than just one factor that distinguishes his music from that which we are accustomed to. His music, he says, is a mirror in which he sees himself standing beside the overlap of two different cultures.

Bukvic, sometimes to his own surprise, sees influences of his Croatian upbringing reflected in his compositions. He agrees that this portion of his identity cannot be separated from his music. “The same way my accent is a part of my speech,” he says.

Some of his compositions are masked in patriotic undertones as he remembers political turmoil from war periods in Croatia. In other tunes, he adds Croatian linguistic elements which, according to him, seemed to have lingered on as he wrote his music.

Bukvic says this international component accompanies his compositions without him even trying to add it. “It happens more and more on a conscious level as I try to explore things I may never have tried before,” he says. “Then I discover that they were there all along.”

So far, Bukvic describes his musical journey as a struggle. Although his music is diverse in the mediums it covers, it requires a very specific kind of audience: one that possesses an open ear.

“When we recognise the individuality of a sound,” Bukvic says, “we look at the possibilities we can utilize. That is when you can open the door and move into a different world.”

If our guests at the Burruss Auditorium were to enter the concert hall and see Ivica Ico Bukvic on stage, they would probably not know what to expect. His sounds fall under no one specific genre, his vocals are made of no one specific choir, and his art describes no one specific culture.

When Bukvic runs the show, no one knows the drill; his job is to make sure there isn’t one at all.