June 11, 2025
SIU Versa’tile chamber ensemble to perform June 18
CARBONDALE, Ill. — The Southern Illinois University Carbondale School of Music will present a free, Versa’tile Chamber Music Ensemble on Wednesday, June 18, in Morris Library’s third-floor rotunda.
Jiyeon Lee and Anthony Gray, collaborative pianists in the School of Music, and cellist William Cernota, who has taught SIU students, will perform at 7 p.m. The program is part of the Yellow Moon Gyroid Concert Series.
The performance will include selections by French composer Francis Poulenc, German composers Johannes Brahms and Ludwig van Beethoven, and Russian composers Alexander Glazunov and Dmitri Shostakovich. The selections will represent several musical periods including the 19th century, classical, romantic and 20th century modern, Cernota said. Advance digital copies of the program will be available by contacting Cernota at bactocello@gmail.com.
Gray is an assistant professor of practice and is active in performance both as a collaborative pianist and soloist. He previously was an adjunct instructor in piano and a collaborative pianist at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise as well as a collaborative pianist at East Tennessee State University. Lee was on the faculty at Soong-Sil University Conservatory in South Korea as well as the University of Virginia’s College at Wise and East Tennessee State University. Cernota, a member of the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra, has been on the music faculty at SIU Carbondale and is at Loyola University Chicago. He formerly taught at Roosevelt, DePaul and Northwestern universities.
Rehearsals open to the public
For those unable to attend the June 18 performance, the ensemble will have rehearsals open to the public at 1 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, June 16-17, in the library’s third-floor rotunda.
This is the fifth concert in the series, which was established in 2024 by Cernota and Reiko Schoen, whose late husband, SIU Carbondale professor Alan Schoen, discovered the gyroid.
The rotunda is home to Yellow Moon Gyroid made by algorithmic artist Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, honoring 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.