BCO's Saless expert in physics, music

Bahman Saless is a man of divided loyalty.

Even as a child he felt torn between a deep interest in music and an obvious aptitude for science and mathematics.

"But it turns out that this conflict is just apparent," he said when speaking to the Boulder Rotary Club. "I decided to become a professional physicist, and have
discovered that the problem-solving that is essential in physics also is essential in music, both in playing and in organizing an ensemble."

Saless took his bachelor's degree at Michigan State University and received his doctorate in physics from CU-Boulder. He spent several years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California before coming back to Boulder to found and operate with his wife, a computer scientist, the firm Earthnet, which provides IT consulting and management services along with server hosting and colocation.

Yet music continued to call, and while in California Saless moonlighted at
Universal Studios as a musician directing music for teasers and trailers -- those
one or two minute films for "coming attractions" and for displaying the credits
at the end of a feature film.

"That wasn't really conducting an orchestra," he said. "The timing for these short films is so critical that everyone wears headphones over which a metronome beat is played to make sure the music fills just the time available."

After returning to Boulder, Saless saw a gap in the performance of live music
in the community, and in 2004 founded the Boulder Chamber Orchestra.

"I thought a chamber orchestra would be a good thing," he said, "but the fact is
that I didn't know how to conduct an orchestra."

So he applied his problem-solving skills as a physicist, explored the Internet, found a conducting seminar in Graz, Austria, and went off to learn about conducting.

"I continue to attend workshops to improve my conducting skills and technique, and I think I'm about 30 percent of the way to where I want to be,” he said.

Saless said a chamber orchestra has close to the number of musicians used
in early performances of classical music, usually about 50, so performances of the 18th and 19th century composers reflect what those composers heard themselves.

The contemporary symphony orchestra of a hundred or so musicians is a
development of the late 19th and 20th centuries, and Haydn,
Beethoven, Brahms and others would be startled at hearing their works from
such an ensemble. More contemporary composers also have written works specifically for the smaller chamber orchestra.

For the last BCO concert of this season on Friday, May 7, Saless will be conducting three of Beethoven’s works: the Romance Cantabile, the Triple Concerto (for piano, cello and violin) and the Eighth Symphony. The concertmaster and the principal cellist of the orchestra will join pianist Larry Graham in the Triple Concerto.

The performance will be at 7:30 p.m. at the First Congregational Church in Boulder, and repeated on Saturday, May 8 at 7:30 at the Broomfield Auditorium.

BOULDER ROTARY CLUB

5390 Manhattan Circle, Suite 101     Boulder, Colorado, 80303

303-554-7074                                                                                      Rotary@roycearbour.com

NEWS FROM BOULDER ROTARY CLUB

Contact: Sue Deans, 303-579-9580

For more information on Rotary, see  www.boulderrotary.org or www.rotary.org.