Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 23, 1993 TAG: 9304220044
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
The Virginia Tech student will solo Saturday night in George Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F with the New River Valley Symphony Orchestra and Conductor James Glazebrook.
Nope, Mulvet is not a music major. He's a doctoral candidate in mathematics, specializing in the abstruse field of fluid dynamics. But for as long as he can remember, music and math have played tug-of-war with his life.
"I guess I'd like to work this impetus out of me that makes me want to play more," Mulvet said. "There's really a time challenge between music and mathematics, but it keeps things interesting."
The concert at Tech's Burruss Hall auditorium starts at 8 p.m. Admission for students (any college or school) and people 55 or older is $3; others, $5.
Mulvet, a 25-year-old Maryland native, said he has pretty much settled on a life in mathematics because "it's more stable" than music. But the time he spends practicing and performing has increased since he first came to Blacksburg for a master's degree in the fall of 1989.
Mulvet credits his mother's persistence for his proficiency at the keyboard. His family lived in upstate New York when he took his first lesson at age 9, and his mother was strict about practice.
"She encouraged me; she forced me sometimes to work and practice," Mulvet said. "But it's developed into something really enjoyable, and I've always been glad that she did. It was the source of more than one family argument at the time."
The mathematician-to-be studied with a Juilliard graduate while living in New Jersey and progressed rapidly. The family later moved to Charlotte, N.C., where as a high school student Mulvet won a young artists' competition and performed Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" with the Charlotte Symphony.
So how did what looked to be a promising concert career wind up amid the chalk dust and formula-strewn blackboards of a math department?
"Well, I enjoy mathematics. I like how it can be used to study the world around us and find out more about the world. We're finding more and more things, other problems in biology and physics, that are being cracked using sophisticated mathematical tools, and I find that exciting."
But pure theory holds no fascination for him. Mulvet says what really exhilarates him is the point at which mathematics intersects the physical world.
"If it doesn't have much to do with the world around us, then I'm not all that interested in it," said Mulvet, whose father was an engineer. The doctoral candidate said he is especially interested in the new science of chaos and developments in dynamical systems.
What's more, he has discovered that music and math are complementary.
"I've found things I've learned in performance that I can apply to teaching. When you're standing up in front of a classroom of 40 students and trying to impart some difficult concept to them, you have to be very aware of your own emotions," he said. "And the discipline and logic of math come in handy when you're learning music."
All this works out fine in the musician-mathematician's life. But his dual life has occasioned concern in other quarters.
"My adviser would definitely like to see less of it [piano playing], but he knows that I do what I want to do. He's more or less resigned to it, I suppose," Mulvet said.
Mulvet's double identity may have produced consternation in the mathematics department, but music Professor James Glazebrook is delighted with what he hears.
"I like to think that this exemplifies one of the things that we try to do in the music department at Tech, which is to provide opportunities for people just like him. Ken is a kind of conspicuously successful example of the person with another major who also plays music," he said.
The conductor listed former Tech students who combined a proficiency at music with more mundane careers.
"There was violinist Larry Chang, who's now an engineer with IBM in Northern Virginia. One of the first soloists I had as conductor with the symphony was a young man who played the Rachmaninov `Paganini Variations' and who is now a physician," Glazebrook said.
"There have been other double majors who did music and architecture, music and physics, music and engineering."
Glazebrook said Mulvet has been no stranger to the music department, although he has enrolled in no classes.
"He's been very active accompanying various music students, he's accompanied a lot of the singers and he's very good with the brass repertoire. He seems to be familiar with a lot of the difficult and showy pieces like the Hindemith and Kent Cannon sonatas," Glazebrook said.
So when Mulvet came to him and proposed that he solo with the Gershwin concerto, Glazebrook was open to the idea. Because of Mulvet's zeal, the orchestra has been able to schedule more rehearsals of the work than they usually get with a guest soloist.
"I spent four or five hours a day over spring vacation just to get it solidly into my fingers," Mulvet said. "Since that time I've done maybe an hour or two a day of playing - just reviewing it and making sure things are there."
Mulvet says his family is driving from Charlotte to be in the audience Saturday night.
Emmanuel Chabrier's concert favorite "Espana" opens the concert, with the Gershwin concerto as the second piece in the first half. The post-intermission half of the concert will be devoted to Ottorino Respighi's four-part tone poem "The Pines of Rome."
Memo: ***CORRECTION***