8A
NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY OF DIRY KANSAS
THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 2009
FINE ARTS
Music festival honors historic composer
Matt Bristow/KANSAN
lewilarson, Idaho Falls, Idaho, graduate student, practices Franz Liszt's "Transcendental Etude No. 6" at Murphy Hall Wednesday. The American List Society National Festival will be held April 3-5. Matt Bristow/KANSAN
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BY MICHELLE SPREHE
Students and international artists to perform his works
msprehe@kansan.com
Composer Franz Liszt will be honored this weekend in a three-day festival where students and pianists from around the world will perform his works.
Pianists from Hong Kong Russia and China will perform this weekend, as well as University students.
Steven Spooner, assistant professor of piano, is on the board of directors for the American Liszt Society and helped bring the festival
Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer and pianist in the 19th century. He was hugely important in the Romantic movement of the era and many consider him the greatest pianist of his time.
to the University.
"I thought the school had a lot of connections to Liszt and it would be a natural fit," Spooner said.
The last grand piano Liszt own,
built especially for his last tour in
England, resides in the Spencer
Museum of Art. Musicians will play
his music on it Friday.
Levi Larson, Idaho Falls,
Idaho, piano graduate student,
will be performing one of Liszt's
"Transcendental Etudes" Sunday.
"The pieces the students are playing are some of the hardest in the piano repertoire."
"The pieces the students are playing are some of the hardest in the piano repertoire," Larson said.
Kezia Schrag, Valley Center piano doctoral student, is housing a pianist from Hong Kong whom she met at a music festival in Poland last summer.
Though Schrag is not playing in the festival, she is volunteering to usher events, register attendees and shuttle performers from the airport.
LEVI LARSON Masters student
"It's a wonderful opportunity to meet a lot of people and network with professionals and hear high-class performances and music," Schrag said.
John Perry, former School of
Fine Arts faculty member, will teach master piano classes Saturday.
Spooner said the festival is usually held in larger cities. Last year it was held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
you could be there a year and not get the quality and number of performances that you could get in this festival." Spooner said.
"In a major city
Larson said he practiced his piece for six hours a day and had been doing so for nine months.
"Most people talk about Liszt's music as being very technically challenging," Spooner said. "It's more than just that — it's incredibly clear and it usually depicts another story."
Edited by Melissa Johnson
schedule
American Liszt Society National Festival Events
FRIDAY, APRIL 3
SATURDAY, APRIL 4
FRIDAY, APRIL 3
— *Performances* by
Federic Chiu, Adam Gyorgy
and others at 7:30 p.m. at
the Spencer Museum of Art.
SATURDAY, APRIL 4
— Master classes by John
Perry in Swartout Recital
Hall in Murphy Hall
— Piano recital featuring
local pianist Koji Attwood
— Recital of Romantic
piano transcriptions
Evening banquet
SUNDAY, APRIL 5
Performances of Liszt's "Transcendental Etudes" by 12 KU students at the Lied Center
— Solo Recital by John Perry
Concert by the KU Concert Chorale
Recital by Stephen Ackert and KU organists in the Bales Organ Recital Hall
- Lecture by keynote speaker, Jonathan Kregor
    - In the K1C0
For more information about tickets and performances, go to http://www.continuaged.ku.edu/programs/lisztinfo.php
TECHNOLOGY
Conficker causes little harm
Computer virus successfully blocked despite aggressive attempts
BY JORDAN ROBERTSON
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO — The Conficker Internet worm's feared April Fools' Day throwdown for control of millions of infected PCs stirred lots of panic but came and went with a whisper.
Security experts say some Conticker-infected computers — those poisoned with the latest
version of the worm — started "phoning home" for instructions more aggressively Wednesday, trying 50,000 Internet addresses instead of 250. However, security companies monitoring the worm remained successful at blocking the communications.
"We didn't see anything that wasn't expected," said Paul Ferguson, a security researcher at antivirus software maker Trend
Micro Inc. "I'm glad April 1 happened to be a nonevent. People got a little too caught up in the hype on that. (The infected computers) didn't go into attack mode, planes didn't fall out of the sky or anything like that."
The worm can take control of unsuspecting PCs running Microsoft's Windows operating system. Tied together into a "botnet," these PCs can be directed to send spam, carry out identity-theft scams and bring down Web sites by flooding them with traffic.
That's why the April 1 change in Conficker's programming was a small twist — and not the end of the story. The network of Conficker-infected machines could still spring to life and be used for nefarious deeds.
One scary element is that Conficker's authors have given the infected PCs peer-to-peer abilities, which allows them to update each other and share malicious commands through encrypted channels. That ability means the computers don't have to contact a Web site at all, and the communications are protected.
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