Engineers bring sounds of music to anniversary celebrants

Emily Smith
ASME NEWS

The founding of ASME will be celebrated with the sounds of music during a performance this month by the Romanian Symphonic Engineers' Orchestra at Stevens Institute's DeBaun Auditorium, the assembly hall where ASME held its first organizational meeting 125 years ago.

About 80 engineers — designers, educators, industrialists, inventors, military engineers, shipbuilders and technical journalists — attended that first meeting on April 7, 1880, at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.

The anniversary performance commemorating Heritage Day will be attended by ASME's Board of Governors and other members of the Society, as well as faculty and students from Stevens. The ticketed performance will be from 7:30 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. on April 8 at the Center for the Performing Arts in the Edwin A. Stevens Building at Stevens.

The Romanian Orchestra of Engineers, which was founded in 1956, is comprised entirely of engineers.

An exhibit featuring ASME past presidents who have a shared Stevens history will accompany the performance. Among the early past presidents are Robert Thurston, a pioneering educator, and Frederick Taylor, noted for his scientific management. From more recent years are Kenneth Roe, ASME's 90th president, and Joseph Falcon, the Society's 111th president.

Tickets are $15 — students will get a 50 percent discount — and can be reserved by calling the DeBaun box office at (201) 216-8937, or send an e-mail to BoxOffice@debaun.org. Note your name, the show (ASME presents the Romanian Orchestra of Engineers), the date (April 8) and how many tickets you would like.

All tickets will be held at the door with your name and can be paid for with cash or check made out to Stevens Institute of Technology when you arrive. Currently, credit cards are not accepted at the door.

The Romanian Orchestra of Engineers is on tour in the United States during April. The performormance at Stevens will be followed by another on April 10, at 4 p.m. in the Cathedral Basilica in Newark, N.J.

Each generation of engineering musicians continues the 50-year tradition of dual advanced studies of music and engineering. This tour will include works by Michael Haydn, Handel, Iosif Ivanovici and Mozart.

Conductor Maestro Petru Ghenghea, an electromechanical engineer and graduate of the Royal Music Academy in Bucharest who is the orchestra's founder, first gathered prominent scientists and teachers in 1956 to form this orchestra under the auspices of the Bucharest Institute of Railroad Engineering.

Conductor Andrei Iliescu, a computer science engineer, graduate of Bucharest Polytechnic Institute and an alumnus of the Bucharest National Academy of Music, is a long-time member of the orchestra and its current conductor.

For more details and direct links to the box office at Stevens and the Cathedral, visit www.asme.org/anniversary.

 

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