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Tracy Silverman premieres 'Love Song to the Sun' with Rogue Valley Symphony Electric violinist and composer Tracy Silverman premieres his new concerto this weekend with the Rogue Valley Symphony. [Photo by Martin B. Cherry] Wednesday Jan 17, 2018 at 3:54 PM Jan 17, 2018 at 3:54 PM How do you get a 21st-century audience to listen to an abstract 30-minute concerto after the first five minutes? Tell a story, says composer and electric violinist Tracy Silverman. Silverman will perform his new Concerto for Electric Violin and Orchestra No. 3 along with the Rogue Valley Symphony, conducted by Martin Majkut, this weekend at Rogue Valley concert venues. "Love Song to the Sun" could be called "A Bug's Life," in jest. The tale follows a gnat through its 24-hour life cycle. The story may seem unsophisticated, but when combined with Silverman's impassioned playing (complete with Jimmy Page-like reverb), a full orchestra and a beautiful video, it turns out to be surprisingly dramatic, even operatic. The video, shot from the gnat’s perspective (we never see the little critter), begins underwater, where it is drawn from birth to the rays of the sun. As the creature ascends, it is set upon by a hungry fish. Evading certain death, it breaks the surface and begins its metamorphosis, accompanied by Silverman’s trademark Led Zeppelin-esque strum-bowing effects. For the remainder of its brief existence, the bug goes in search of a mate (set to a Jimi Hendrix-like musical segment titled “Sex Overdrive”), avoids another predator (this one’s a bird), and finally ends up back in the water, illuminated by the glow of the moon. "Love Song to the Sun" is the third composition to be premiered by RVS during its 50th anniversary season. Also on the program, RVS celebrates the 100th birthday of composer Leonard Bernstein with "Fancy Free: Three Dance Variations" and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. Concerts are set for 7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 19, in the Music Recital Hall, 405 S. Mountain Ave., at Southern Oregon University in Ashland; 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 20, at the Craterian Theater, 23 S. Central Ave., Medford; and 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 21, at the Performing Arts Center, 830 N.E. Ninth St., Grants Pass. Majkut will host pre-concert talks one hour before each show. Ticket are $41 to $60 for the Ashland show; $20 to $53 for the Medford show; and $20 to $48 for the Grants Pass show. Tickets are $15 for ages 6 through 22 at all shows. Tickets can be purchased at rvsymphony.org or by calling 541-708-6400. Tickets for the Medford show also can be purchased at craterian.org or by calling 541-779-3000. From the start, Silverman wanted his new concerto to tell a story that functioned as a parable. He wanted a tale that would illustrate the importance of all living things, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant. “If you can feel empathy for the simplest of life, you can feel it for everyone,” Silverman said in a 2017 interview with John Pitcher for nashvillescene.com. “That’s what I wanted to get across.” Silverman tried to find this kind of story in ancient mythology, literature and various world religions.  “You would have at least thought there’d be some Zen myth about the significance of tiny creatures,” he says, “but there was nothing.” So the violinist created his own narrative, told with sound and images.  For the video, Silverman turned to Todd Winkler, a composer and multimedia artist on the faculty at Brown University. Winkler used underwater cameras, drones and sophisticated programs to create a film that is part nature documentary, part music video and part light show. Some of the most riveting scenes are live shots of Silverman in performance, his image transformed — make that metamorphosed — into various abstracted and pixelated silhouettes. A violinist from 1993 to 1997 with the innovative Turtle Island String Quartet, Silverman was named one of 100 distinguished alumni by The Juilliard School. After his graduation in 1980, he built one of the first six-string violins and set his own course as a musical pioneer, designing and performing on an instrument that did not previously exist. He's contributed significantly to the instrument's repertoire and the non-classical stylistic approach he calls “21st century violin playing,” inspiring several concertos composed specifically for him. Silverman discovered he had also developed a new approach to string playing. The additional two strings open up opportunities for lower register and a new approach to using the bow. The possibility of playing the violin as a chordal instrument like the guitar forced Silverman to imagine a more rhythmic way of using the bow, which he calls "strum bowing." “My voice as an electric violinist comes from the fact that I have always been interested in non-classical music — rock, jazz, music from India, Africa and Brazil," he said in the nashvillescene.com interview. "I entered Juilliard wanting to be the next Jascha Heifetz, but I left wanting to be the next Jimi Hendrix. It was actually fortuitous that I couldn’t play guitar or saxophone and was limited to finding a way to get all those sounds out of a violin instead. My musical odyssey has brought me full circle — from classical roots to rock and jazz and Brazilian and Indian music and now back to the classical world again.”