Yellow Moon Gyroid Concert Series event set at SIU’s Morris Library

Four Southern Illinois University Carbondale master of music students will help everyone think of warmer weather ahead during a concert set for Friday, March 21, in Morris Library’s third-floor rotunda.

The Yellow Moon Gyroid Concert Series will present “SPRING” in a free, public program that starts at 4 p.m. 

The concert will include a variety of classical masterpieces by German composers Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Max Bruch; French composer Gabriel Fauré, and contemporary works by American cellist Mark Summer and Paul Coletti, a viola soloist from the United Kingdom. In addition to the string pieces, the performance will also include a yatga, a Mongolian traditional harp.

Series co-directors Reiko Schoen and cellist William Cernota, who has taught SIU students, began the concert series in fall 2024 in honor of Schoen’s late husband, Alan Schoen, who discovered the gyroid. 

Reiko Schoen is a member of the Music Teacher National Association and Federation of National Music Clubs and started the Musical Sprouts piano studio in Carbondale 31 years ago. She will accompany solo pieces of the three string players on piano.

Schoen said she is grateful for generous donations from four couples and four individuals, which are allowing the series to bring more concerts this spring and in the fall. 

She added that she “appreciates from the bottom of my heart all of the performers in this series,” including SIU School of Music faculty and students and community musicians, along with the efforts of John Pollitz, dean of Library Affairs, and Richard Kelley, School of Music director.

“The teamwork and enthusiastic response from the concert audience, both regular and new people, have helped in establishing this unique concert series,” Schoen said.

She is acquainted with the musicians who will perform March 21.

“I am so grateful for them to perform on this occasion despite their busy graduate study schedules in their final semester,” Schoen said. “I wanted to have them together in one more program before they stepped forward to the next musical destinations in their careers.”

The rotunda is home to Yellow Moon Gyroid made by algorithmic artist Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, honoring Alan Schoen’s 1968 discovery while working for NASA.

A gyroid is an infinitely connected periodic minimal surface with no straight lines; a minimal surface has the smallest area possible within a given boundary. 

Schoen, a physicist, mathematician and computer scientist, taught at SIU Carbondale from 1973 to 1996.

For information about the performance, contact Reiko Schoen at reikotaka@gmail.com.