The South Dakota School of Mines & Technology Music Department presents “Fantasy and Fright,” at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 12, in the Music Center on the SD Mines campus (map here). The concert will include a performance on a student-designed and created marimba.

“Fantasy and Fright” features the Mines wind ensemble, master chorale and the newly formed men’s choir and women’s choir, performing musical selections from the dreams and nightmares of composers and authors through the centuries.

The  student-made marimba will be featured in a portion of the concert honoring the novel “Frankenstein.” The marimba is a percussion instrument usually consisting of a set of wooden bars struck with mallets. The student-made instrument is made with ordinary PVC pipe and “tuned” to the correct intonation. Engineering students worked throughout the summer to build their “creation.”

“They used their engineering skills to design and build an instrument that has precise pitches and tones,” said Haley Armstrong, D.M.A., SD Mines Director of Bands. “It’s a perfect example of how music and the arts intersect with science and engineering.”

The choirs will be directed by Matthew Bumbach, D.M.A., Mines Director of Choirs. Bumbach says the audience may recognize a few of the works because they come from popular musicians such as Vienna Tang and the band Muse. “These songs are a perfect fit for the Halloween month of October,” Bumbach says. “The choirs especially are showing how technology can turn from a dream to our nightmare.”

SD Mines Humanities professor Laura Kremmel, Ph.D., will narrate the program. Kremmel teaches and contributes research in the fields of romanticism, gothic studies and the history of medicine.