Musicians provide music at the museum every month

Harp players will perform at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art in the Chase Fine Arts Center at Utah State University on Friday at 4 p.m.

The music department has been sending people to perform at the museum on the first Friday every month since September.

According Nadra Haffar, the museum’s curator, the idea came when the museum was closed.

“We wanted to give people a date that they could remember that the museum would be open,” Haffar said.

Haffar said social events are offered in other museums to give people a reason to want to come.

“So we had been brainstorming for a quite a while about ‘How do we do that?’ and ‘Should we give it a try?’” Haffar said. “So this last semester, we tried it.”

James Bankhead, the head of the music department, said the museum asked his department to provide music for people who want to visit it.

“It’s turned out to be really a cool thing,” Bankhead said. “A lot of people come, and we’ve had various students perform.”

Haffar said when the museum started having regular hours, people gave feedback that they wanted the music to continue on the first Friday of every month.

According to Haffar, the number of people attending the museum increased every time. She said about 10 to 12 people attended the first performance, and about 50 attended the last one.

“But we figured out that the first Friday at four is not a good time because a lot of students leave campus on Friday afternoons,” Haffar said. “So next semester we’re doing it on the third Thursday at three.”

Bankhead said the benefit that comes from these performances is the arts are interrelated.

“You can listen to music by Debussy and look at a Monet painting and realize they’re both impressionists, and they’re doing impressionistic things,” Bankhead said. “One’s visual and the other one’s aural, but it’s basically the same kind of concept. So you are strengthening both art forms by having them together.”