 "Photo: Erik Christiansen/Poly Post")
 "Photo: Erik Christiansen/Poly Post")
Thursday during U-Hour, students performed at the Showcase Music Hour at the recital hall.
"The Showcase Music Hour shows the full range of what we do at Cal Poly, containing … works by living composers for TV and film and also older music from past centuries," said music professor Peter Yates. "So we have everything here from the most recent music all the way back to the most ancient serious art music and everything in between."
The afternoon show started off with Tyrone Green performing "Prelude et Ballade," a trumpet piece by Guillaume Balay.
Accompanied by Janet Noll on the piano - Noll participated on the piano for the first three performances - the piece started off slow and melodic. Sad at first, the piece picked up toward the middle at a quicker and happier pace.
Linda Huang then performed three flute pieces by Arthur Foote. All three pieces made transported the audience into a Disney movie.
"It was very amazing. I loved every piece," said Nicholas Ventura, a third-year music student.
Halfway through the performance, the audience was treated to a vocal performance by Edcarlo Arafiles.
In the cartoon show "Animaniacs," there is an episode where the character Yakko performs a long song, singing all the countries in the world. "Yakko's World," a ballad by Randy Rogel, put the singer through a vocal workout, but at the end Arafiles received a full house ovation.
After the spectacular vocal performance, Audrey Lamprey, Michael Mariano and Tony Southern performed two horn pieces by Lowell Shaw.
The sound of the two pieces made one feel as if he or she were at a USC football game, listening to the marching band.
Philip De La O, a senior music performance student, was the only guitarist in the performance. Playing pieces by Spanish composer Alonso Mudarra and Johann Sebastian Bach, the quick finger picking produced a relaxing sound that put the audience at ease.
"The first piece I chose because it prepares me for the next piece … so it's kind of like a warm-up piece followed by a challenging piece," said De La O.
The most exciting performance was saved for the end.
Phillip Pitcher, a third-year computer engineering and music student, performed Beethoven's "Piano Sonata in F minor."
The piece required Pitcher to strike the keys quickly, changing from a hard, deep sound to a softer, sedated sound. At times he produced a dream-like sound before picking up the tempo.
"It was very difficult, in the sense of remembering every little thing. Sometimes it would cause me to have blanks, because it'll go really fast," said Pitcher. "All the passages would go really fast, but I think the physical part was to memorize the chord progressions."
The audience was left wanting more once the performance was over; luckily, the department hosts many of these performances.
"Each quarter we confer with the different studio instructors to find out who is ready to perform or will have [a] recital coming up, and from them I have selected these people," said music professor Peter Yates. "Of these people we are hearing today, three of these people have recitals this spring, so this is a little preview of what they will be doing."
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