Present Music presents

Flat on your back on the dry wintry grass

a cine concert

November 16, 2022 | 7:30 pm Central Time
Milwaukee Art Museum | Milwaukee

Generously sponsored by Jan Serr & John Shannon and the Warehouse Art Museum

Prelude

Traditional: Opening Song

The Bucks Native American Singing and Drumming Group

Program

Music by Philip Miller
Films and Installations by William Kentridge

Drawings for Projection

Felix in Exile (1994), Stereoscope (1999), Tide Table (2003), Other Faces (2011)

from Paper Music: Isihlahla (Waiting for the Sibyl) (2014)

Four Songs from the poems of Eliza Kentridge (2022) — world premiere, commissioned by Jan Serr & John Shannon

1. Flat on your back on the dry wintry grass
2. I never want to see another Madam Butterfly
3. In the South it is always Summer
4. Like a weaned child

INTERMISSION

from Refuse the Hour: Colonial Invasions (2012)

from The Head & the Load (2018)

Abelungu Ngodamn, The Wounded Man, Amakatsi

Jerusalema (2022)
A hymn from the installation That Which We Do Not Remember

Triumphs and Laments Suite (2016)
excerpt from the processional music commissioned for the Frieze, Testeverno, Rome

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This concert would not be possible without the support of community members like YOU. In honor of 40 years of Present Music, we humbly ask your support to continue offering a platform for diverse and groundbreaking new talent, as witnessed here today.

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Present Music
3720 N Fratney St, Unit 2i
Milwaukee, WI 53212

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Credits

Guest Artists

Ann Masina — soprano
Tshegofatso Moeng — baritone

Present Music

David Bloom and Eric Segnitz — Co-Artistic Directors

Avuya Ngcaweni and Tshilidzi Ndou — understudies

Don Sipe — trumpet
Megumi Kanda — trombone
Carl Storniolo — percussion
Jahmes Finlayson — percussion
John Orfe — piano
Stas Venglevski — accordion
Sharan Leventhal — violin
Eric Segnitz — violin
Erin Pipal — viola
Adrien Zitoun — cello
Christian Dillingham — bass
David Bloom — conductor
Marty Butorac — sound and video engineer

Staff:

Barbara Schneider — Managing Director
Daniel Petry — Development Manager
Marty Butorac — Operations Manager
Alex Moreno — Digital Marketing Coordinator

Board of Directors:

Jessica Franken — President
Carole Nicksin — Vice-President
Fran Richman — Secretary
Brian Wilson — Treasurer
Louise Hermsen — Governance
Cecile Cheng
Heidi Dondlinger
Tim Frautschi (Special Director)
William Helmers
Ron Jacquart (Special Director)
Gary Van Wert
Donna Woodall

Additional Credits

Livestreaming by David Vartanian, DV Productions

Special Thanks

Jan Serr & John Shannon
Warehouse Art Museum
Milwaukee Art Museum
Kentridge Studio
THE OFFICE performing arts + film
Alexis Roberts
Jeff Bentoff
Canopies
Studio Gear
Dave Hulbert
Avuya Ngcaweni
Tshilidzi Ndou
Katie Heil
Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education at UWM

About the Creators

Philip Miller

Philip Miller is a composer and sound artist from South Africa. His work cuts across diverse musical genres and media including music-theatre, contemporary dance, choral and symphonic works and video and sound installations. His long-time collaboration with William Kentridge, has spanned nearly 30 years, from some of Kentridge’s most seminal films and multimedia installations, including Black Box/ Chambre Noire (2005), I am not me, the horse is not mine (2013), Refusal of Time (2015), Triumphs and Laments (2016), and The Head and the Load (2018), which have been presented at museums and concert halls including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Armory, MOMA and the Tate Modern and Royal Academy. His choral composition Rewind, a cantata for voice, tape and testimony, which emerged out of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, has toured extensively, including the South Bank Centre, Celebrate Brooklyn Festival, and MASS MOCA. He has been the recipient of honorary fellowships and residencies including the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre, Civitella Rainieri, and the Centre of Archive and Public Culture, University of Cape Town. Miller is currently completing his opera, GLOW: The life and trials of Simon Nkoli which will premiere in South Africa in 2023.

William Kentridge

William Kentridge (born Johannesburg, South Africa, 1955) is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre and opera productions. His method combines drawing, writing, film, performance, music, theatre, and collaborative practices to create works of art that are grounded in politics, science, literature and history, yet maintaining a space for contradiction and uncertainty. Kentridge’s work has been seen in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Musée du Louvre in Paris, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Zeitz MOCAA, the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He has participated a number of times in Documenta in Kassel (2012, 2002,1997) and the Venice Biennale (2015, 2013, 2005, 1999 and 1993). Opera productions include Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Shostakovich’s The Nose, and Alban Berg’s operas Lulu and Wozzeck, and have been seen at opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, La Scala in Milan, English National Opera in London, Opera de Lyon, Amsterdam opera, the Sydney Opera House, and the Salzburg Festival. Kentridge’s theatrical productions, performed in theatres and at festivals across the globe include Refuse the Hour, Winterreise, Paper Music, The Head & the Load, Ursonate, and Waiting for the Sibyl, and in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company, Ubu & the Truth Commission, Faustus in Africa!, Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, and Woyzeck on the Highveld. In 2016 Kentridge founded the Centre for Less Good Idea in Johannesburg: a space for responsive thinking and making through experimental, collaborative and cross-disciplinary arts practices. The centre hosts an ongoing programme of workshops, public performances, and mentorship activities.

Eliza Kentridge

Eliza Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1962. She studied English Literature and African History at university in South Africa, before working for an anti-apartheid educational organisation. She moved to England in 1988, studied printmaking in Oxford, and has lived in a riverside village in Essex since 1990. She is an artist and a writer – her poetry collection, Signs for an Exhibition, was published by Modjaji Books in 2015. Her visual art includes embroidery, drawing, printmaking and collage. Her work is mostly figurative, although she also brings words into her stitched pieces. She is known for, among other things, her appliqued flags, inspired by Ghanaian Fante flags, and her embroidered drawings, where she stitches a drawing made on tracing paper onto cloth. She has had an ongoing collaboration with Dieu Donne Paper Mill in New York. Her artist’s book, Selected Signs, based on her poetry, was published by Dieu Donne in 2017. Since the pandemic began, she has added quilt making and abstract works sewn on found fabric and paper to her practise.

Notes from the Composer

My collaboration with William Kentridge began in 1994 when I wrote music for his film Felix in Exile, part of his Soho Eckstein series. This was a time of heady, political change in South Africa. It was the dawn of democracy, Nelson Mandela had been elected President, and for the first time, erased histories, narratives, images, voices and sounds, formed part of our creative imagination.

Twenty-seven years later, we continue to draw on this thematic material. However, it is no longer bound by place nor time but rather rooted in a language deeply embedded in our homeland and more specifically, the city of Johannesburg.

From multimedia installations and large-scale performances, many of the works heard tonight, have only ever existed in forms which until now, were not easily presented in a concert hall.

Tonight’s concert celebrates these projects in their renewed configurations, arranged for the extraordinary voices of Ann Masina and Tshegofatso Moeng. Both artists share a long and close relationship with me, and continue to contribute to the sonic texture of the works through an intuitive meeting of sound and emotion.

This concert has an added dimension as it premieres a specially commissioned song cycle based on the poems of Liza Kentridge. With her sparse shards of words and haiku-like phrases, I feel the dry winter Highveld, its burnt dry grasses, its golden light above in the sky and the raucous cry of the hadeda bird. This is a sonic landscape which is familiar but never nostalgic. Underlying these poems, we sense the loss of an innocent childhood, where growing up in a fractured society during apartheid reveals the entangled connection between pain and beauty.

About the Guest Artists

Ann Masina

Ann Masina, born in Witbank, Mpumalanga, is a versatile, talented and formidable big woman with an ever bigger voice who handle operas, classical, gospel, jazz and pop with great aplomb. She began her career as a soloist in the Africa Sings Choral Choir in 1994 before joining the Nick Malan Opera House (now known as the Cape Town Opera House) in 1999. There, under professor Angelo Gobbato, she performed operas such as Carmen and Aida to great acclaim. Ms. Masina is a co-founder of JOAT Opera Group. From 2005 to 2009 she worked with choreographer Robyn Orlin and extensively toured Europe in her productions Dressed to Kill, Venus, and Walking Next to Our Shoes. She was a member of the two-time Grammy Award-winning Soweto Gospel Choir from 2007-2009. In the 2014-2015 season she performed in a musical called Colour Me Human produced by Steve Dyer performed at the Soweto Theatre and Jo’burg Theatre. Since 2012, she has been part of William Kentridge’s productions and workshops such as Refuse The Hour, Paper Music, and Triumph and Laments, which have toured the world. As a part of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, she performed in many productions, including Venus vs. Modernity with Lebo Mashile during the Centre’s first season. Most recently, along with her work on The Head and the Load, she performed in the Cape Town premiere of Venus Hottentot vs. Modernity for Design Indaba in February 2018.

Tshegofatso Moeng

Tshegofatso Moeng is a singer, composer, and arranger from Magong, South Africa. He received a Fulbright Scholarship (2014) to study in the US for a Master of Music in Opera Performance from the University of Maryland (2017). In recent seasons, he performed in the United States and Europe. He was heard in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Blitztein’s Regina as part of the Maryland Opera Studio, Verdi’s La traviata with Ash Lawn Opera, and as a soloist in Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden gesellen with Inscape Orchestra. He has also portrayed roles of Junius & Tarquinius in Britten’s The Rape Of Lucretia and Jupitor in Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers with MOS. He has also been involved in productions of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Puccini’s Turandot and Madama Butterfly, gala concerts, and stage concerts such as William Kentridge’s The Head and the Load. Mr. Moeng is co-arranger of an album of a selection of songs by 20th century South African composer Reuben T. Caluza titled Reuben T. Caluza: The B Side in 2021.

About Present Music

Since its founding in Milwaukee in 1982, the group's mission has been to commission and perform new concert music, bringing over 70 new works to life. "Expect Present Music to bring on the unexpected” (Shepherd Express) with programming that introduces innovative concert formats, embraces a broad diversity of repertoire, and makes the music of our time accessible to audiences with deep expression and serious fun.

The Present Music ensemble ranges from a core group of seven musicians to an ensemble of twenty or more. The group has worked closely with many of the nation's top composers, including John Adams, Henry Brant, David Lang, Caroline Shaw, Ingram Marshall, Missy Mazzoli, Bright Sheng, Roberto Sierra, and Michael Torke; and has a long and impressive track record for identifying outstanding talent early in the artists’ careers. Present Music’s discography includes world premiere recordings on the Argo, Albany, Aoede, Northeastern, Naxos, and Innova labels. Raven Chacon’s Voiceless Mass, commissioned and premiered by Present Music, won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

The group is led by Co-Artistic Directors violinist/composer Eric Segnitz and conductor David Bloom. Present Music was founded by conductor Kevin Stalheim, who was Artistic Director for the first 37 years of the ensemble’s existence until 2019.