WMU

Western Michigan University Biological Sciences professor Tiffany Schriever says she and a group of students walk the trails down to wetlands from spring to fall. They use nets and water chemistry equipment to test the waters near the Great Lakes coastline.

Schriever will be among the presenters at Western Michigan University’s Spring Convocation on Tuesday, March 26th at the Fetzer Center. She says they have found great diversity in wetlands, even those that are relatively close together.

It's not everyday you meet a musical group that's been together for 33 years. Even rarer is a group of 33 years' standing that includes all of the original founding members. Ann Elliott-Goldschmid (first violin), Sharon Stanis (second violin) and Joanna Hood (viola) joined Cara Lieurance for a trip down memory lane and a look at their program for March 20 at Western Michigan University's Dalton Center Recital Hall on the BPI Series. 

Rostislav Dubinsky, the great Russian violinist of the Borodin Quartet who moved to the United States in the early 1980s to teach at Indiana University, was a major early influence. A friend of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, he shared his insight and musical notes on the composer's intentions. Now based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, the members of the Lafayette Quartet say they took their name from the Detroit boulevard of the same name, where they lived soon after forming the group.

Lushh's Eddie Codrington, who wrote the music, and audio/visual artist Peter Warner, who created the visuals, join Cara Lieurance to preview The Archangel Suite, an immersive musical and visual experience which will be offered in two free concerts on Saturday, March 16 at 6 and 9 pm in the Multi-Media Room in the Dalton Center Recital Hall at Western Michigan University.

Codrington explains that he was searching for a theme for a series of pieces, something like Gustav Holsts's The Planets, when the idea of archangels popped into his mind. He began researching the histories of these sacred beings, ultimately choosing four - Raphael, Gabriel, Lucifer and Michael - to compose jazz-based pieces around. Warner was the collaborator on a previous Lushh project, Insight Unsought, and he worked for eight months on creating visuals that relied on both abstract and symbolic images which worked with the theme and the music.

When the Kalamazoo Nature Center moved its annual Maple Sugar Festival from the third weekend to the second weekend in March, it wasn’t because organizers had tired of the old date. Instead, they were trying to stay ahead of increasingly warm winters and a shorter sugaring season.