Present Music presents

Keeping Time

October 14 & 15, 2021 | 7:30 pm
Jan Serr Studio | Milwaukee, WI
& Present Music Digital Stage

This concert is generously sponsored by Jan Serr & John Shannon,
and Wisconsin Latvian Cultural Foundation

Program

Conlon Nancarrow, arr. Dominic Murcott: Study for Player Piano No. 21 (Canon X) (1961, arr. 2021)

Jessie Montgomery: Starburst (2012)

Krists Auznieks: Untimed (2021) — world premiere, commissioned by Present Music

Leila Adu: Negative Space (2013)

Donna Woodall — vocalist

Tansy Davies: Antenoux (2017)

choreographed by Maria Gillespie

— Intermission —

Caroline Mallonee: Keeping Time in a Bottle (2002)

Kevin Stalheim — special guest

Daniel Kidane: Be Still (2020, arr. 2021) — world premiere arrangement, commissioned by Present Music

Andrew Hamilton: music for people who like art (2009)

Ariadne Greif — vocalist

Sigur Rós: Gobbledigook (2008)

Ariadne Greif & Donna Woodall — vocalists
choreographed by Maria Gillespie

Sponsors

Keeping Time is generously sponsored by Jan Serr and John Shannon, and the Wisconsin Latvian Cultural Foundation. Student tickets donated by Tim and Sue Frautschi, Louise Hermsen, and Cecile Cheng.

Present Music’s 2021-2022 season is made possible with generous leadership support from the United Performing Arts Fund, sponsorship of St. John’s on the Lake, and funding from New Music USA, the Milwaukee Arts Board, the Milwaukee County Cultural, Artistic and Musical Programming Advisory Council, and the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Present Music

David Bloom and Eric Segnitz — Co-Artistic Directors

Jennifer Clippert — flutes
William Helmers — clarinets
Nicki Roman — saxophones
Megumi Kanda — trombone
Carl Storniolo — percussion
Jahmes Finlayson — hand percussion
John Orfe — piano & keyboard
Derek Johnson — electric & steel string guitars
Emily Melendes — harp
Eric Segnitz — violin, guitar & bottle
Jeanyi Kim — violin
Chi Li — violin
John Bian — violin
Erin Pipal — viola
Alejandro Duque — viola
Adrien Zitoun — cello
Nick Mariscal — cello
Christian Dillingham — contrabass & electric bass
David Bloom — conductor & bottle
Marty Butorac — sound engineer

Guest Artists

Ariadne Greif — vocalist
Donna Woodall — vocalist
Kevin Stalheim — bottle
Maria Gillespie — choreographer, dancer
Cuauhtli Ramirez Castro — dancer
Tisiphani Mayfield — dancer
Maggie Seer — dancer
Kevin Williamson — dancer

Additional Credits

Nancarrow video by Bob Monagle and John Tanner and Tanner/Monagle Studios
Livestreaming by David Vartanian, DV Productions
Lighting design by Mischa Premeau

Special thanks

Tim and Sue Frautschi
Maria Gillespie
Louise Hermsen
Bob Monagle
Kyle Norris
Peck School of the Arts at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Mischa Premeau
Paul Sekulski
Jan Serr and John Shannon
John Tanner
Wisconsin Latvian Cultural Foundation

From the Co-Artistic Directors

Greetings, and welcome to the opening concert of Present Music’s 40th season! We’re celebrating with a whole year of newly commissioned works from five trailblazing composers, representing the rich diversity of backgrounds and ideas that have always been our hallmark.

In tonight's program, we are thrilled to present a new work by Krists Auznieks, whose stunning musical landscapes unleash the imagination. His concept for Untimed inspired tonight’s program, which unravels the many ways in which time can be perceived through the lens of music. From the tangled web of time in Nancarrow's Canon, to lightning-fast thrum of Jessie Montgomery's depiction of a star coming to life, to the expansive depths of Daniel Kidane's Be Still, we can feel the push and pull of time.

Our collective experience of time has been profoundly unstable in the 20 months since we were last gathered here at the Jan Serr Studio—months have felt like hours, weeks like years. Now that we can gather again, we are incredibly grateful to root our work in the time we get to spend with you, reveling in the beauty, adventure, and surprises of greatest music of today.

Present Music's founder Kevin Stalheim led one of the nation’s first and longest-running new music ensembles with a passion for progress, pushing many boundaries now taken for granted. His innovations redefined and expanded the idea of what a concert can be, and even where it can be—from a drained swimming pool in Riverwest to Casals Hall in Tokyo. Perhaps his most remarkable achievement has been the faithful audience cultivated for new music in Milwaukee.

It’s with a mix of pride and wonder that we salute Kevin’s time, this amazing organization, and everyone who has participated in this grand experiment we call Present Music. Onward!

Sincerely,
David and Eric

Guest Artists

Donna Woodall

With her unique blend of jazz, blues, soul, and pop, Donna Woodall presents lush, intimate vocals with every performance and has established herself as a talented singer, bandleader, and songwriter in the Milwaukee music scene. “I am a dread-locked singer/songwriter/bandleader/8th grade English teacher from Milwaukee, WI who feels most at home in a cool T-shirt and comfy jeans. If Carole King and Cassandra Wilson had a baby, they'd produce me.”

She skillfully blends the musical styles of artists such as Cassandra Wilson, Bonnie Raitt, Norah Jones, Tracy Chapman, and Esperanza Spalding with elements of traditional jazz, blues, and what she affectionately calls “soulful folk.” The result? A fresh, new feel on familiar pop songs. Audiences are delighted by her eclectic song selections, cool originals, creative renditions of classic hits, and her bold moves into different music genres.

Donna's talents also come alive on her self-produced album, The Subject Love. This labor of love let her flex her songwriting muscle, showcasing her original material. Check out selected songs on the music page. Performing at several of Milwaukee's most prestigious events and festivals, Donna has gathered a dedicated following. Masterful delivery and a captivating stage performance set Donna apart from the rest.

Ariadne Greif

Ariadne Greif, praised for her “luminous, expressive voice” (New York Times), her “elastic and round high notes” (classiqueinfo), and her “mesmerizing stage presence” (East Anglian Daily Times), began her opera career as a ‘boy’ soprano in the Los Angeles area and at the LA Opera, eventually making an adult debut singing Lutoslawski’s Chantefleurs et Chantefables with the American Symphony Orchestra. She starred in roles ranging from Therese/Tirésias in Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias at the Aldeburgh Festival, Adina in The Elixir of Love with the Orlando Philharmonic, to Sappho in Atthis by Georg Friedrich Haas, for which The New York Times noted her “searing top notes,” and “dusky depths,” calling it “a solo high-wire act for Ms. Greif,” “a vehicle for Ms. Greif’s raw, no-holds-barred performance,” “one of the most searingly painful and revealing operatic performances in recent times.”

Ariadne spent the summer of 2020 creating a new piece, called Bird Party, for the 2020 Ultima Festival in Oslo, Norway, where it was premiered in September. Bird Party exists as a stand-alone film, by cinematographer Caroline Mariko Stucky, featuring a collection by designer St. Barite. In 2021, she premiered works by Joseph C. Phillips, Jr. and Caroline Shaw and will perform with William Kentridge in the fall in his production of Ursonate at the Philharmonie Luxembourg.

A champion of new music since her teens, she has premiered over fifty large-scale pieces and a half-dozen new operas, which have included the role of Yaga the Witch in Matti Kovler’s Ami & Tami, where she played a villain for the first time, and a nameless main role in Gabrielle Herbst’s disturbing masterpiece BODILESS. Though the opera is hardly ‘new’ at a hundred years old, Ariadne sang the main female role, Lady Madeline, in the US premiere of Debussy’s unfinished opera La Chute de la Maison Usher in its most complete form, with the Opera Français de New York. 

Maria Gillespie

Maria Gillespie, choreographer/dance educator, directs Hyperlocal MKE and The Collaboratory, dedicated to interdisciplinary improvised performance. She has performed and taught nationally and internationally in Mexico City, Tokyo, Beijing, and Guangzhou. She is Associate Professor and Chair of Dance at UWM.

Gillespie's choreography for tonight’s program is inspired by patterns in nature, branching, spiraling, packing, meandering, exploding. The movement plays with momentum and efficiency achieved in arcs that sweep and carve into spiral paths and gestures.

About the Music

Conlon Nancarrow, arr. Dominic Murcott: Study for Player Piano No. 21 (Canon X) (1961, arr. 2021)

Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano is a series of 49 études for self-playing piano. Often exploring complex rhythmic variations beyond the ability of a human pianist, these compositions are some of the best-known and celebrated compositions by Nancarrow. Study for Player Piano No. 21 (Canon X) is an acceleration study where one voice progressively slows down while the other speeds up. The study starts with a bass line playing a 12-tone row at about 4 notes per second, immediately followed by the other voice, playing thirty-nine notes per second. Then the bass line starts to speed up and the treble line slows down progressively, reaching the same tempo halfway through the piece. The piece ends up with one of the lines playing 120 notes per second. It was presumably written in 1961 and was first performed in the Mexico City performance in 1962. The X alludes to the tempo acceleration and deceleration of both parts in the canon.

Conlon Nancarrow was born in Texarkana in 1912. He was still a teenager when he left to study at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory, and play trumpet in a German beer hall. He then moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where he studied composition privately with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Nicolas Slonimsky and conducted a Works Progress Administration (WPA) orchestra. Like many artists in that period, he joined the Communist Party and went to Spain in 1937 to fight against Francisco Franco’s fascist army. He was wounded and escaped after Franco’s victory, but the U.S. State Department had by then branded him an “undesirable”. In protest, he moved to Mexico City in 1940, where he lived almost 60 years. As he continued composing, he realized that the complex rhythms he envisioned could be cut on a player piano roll. In 1947, he bought a player piano and punching machine and began composing his Studies for Player Piano, which captured the attention of the musical world.

Jessie Montgomery: Starburst (2012)

This brief one-movement work for string orchestra is a play on imagery of rapidly changing musical colors. Exploding gestures are juxtaposed with gentle fleeting melodies in an attempt to create a multidimensional soundscape. A common definition of a starburst, “the rapid formation of large numbers of new stars in a galaxy at a rate high enough to alter the structure of the galaxy significantly,” lends itself almost literally to the nature of the performing ensemble that premiered the work, the Sphinx Virtuosi, and I wrote the piece with their dynamic in mind.

Jessie Montgomery was born and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s during a time when artists gravitated to the hotbed of artistic experimentation. Her parents – her father a musician, her mother a theater artist and storyteller regularly brought Jessie to rallies, performances, and parties which celebrated the movements of the time. From these experiences, she has created a life that merges composing, performance, education, and advocacy. Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. She is currently one of the most performed living composers, with 400 performances of her work slated for the 2021-22 season. Jessie began her violin studies, at the Third Street Music School Settlement, and holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a Graduate Fellow in Music Composition at Princeton University. She continues a performance career in conjunction with her composing.

Leila Adu: Negative Space (2013)

Text:

I exist in a negative space
I am not white and neither am I a guy
I am not nature, an object, or your soul
I’m just a girl waiting to go home

Born on a fluffy cloud, never had to think about what it was like to be left out of the history books
Explorers and sugar men, nothing but jumped up crooks
You can play at being strange, but strange ain’t stamped on your head
Send your kids to school in a hoodie, they won’t wind up in a body bag
They can do drugs, get arrested, next day wind up a college grad

I’m not militant, I’m a peaceful kinda girl
I don’t aim to stake out my claim
I just wanna do my thing about the place
but I exist in a negative space

Leila Adu-Gilmore is a composer-performer of New Zealand Pākehā and Ghanaian descent and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand, with family in London. She is passionate about the role of music in social change, mental well-being and human connection, and seeks out collaborations wherever she travels. Dr. Adu-Gilmore received her doctorate of music in composition from Princeton University in 2017 and her Bachelor of Music (Honours) from Victoria University of Wellington (NZ) in 2003. She has released 5 albums, sung worldwide, been compared to Nina Simone, and presented  research in China, the UK, New Zealand and France. She is currently an assistant professor in the music technology program in the music and performing arts professions department at Steinhardt, New York University. 

Tansy Davies: Antenoux (2017)

“Ancient calendars were all based on lunar cycles, and in the Celtic world, the year began on the sixth day after the first new moon following the vernal equinox. Each month was divided into two fortnightly periods, known as anagan and antenoux.” — Tansy Davies

Tansy Davies is a musician whose boundary crossing curiosity makes her one of the most distinctive voices in British music today. With a background as a horn player, electric guitarist and vocalist, her work is brilliantly imaginative and often gloriously offbeat, drawing inspiration from the Troubadours to Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Stevie Wonder. Her critically acclaimed first opera Between Worlds – a bold and highly individual response to the events of 9/11 to a libretto by Nick Drake – was premiered by English National Opera. Having previously taught at the Royal Academy of Music, London, Davies is currently an Associate Professor of Composition at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. She studied composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Royal Holloway.

Daniel Kidane: Be Still (2020, arr. 2021)

Written towards the end of 2020, Be Still is a reflective piece on the year gone by. In a year where lockdowns became a thing, the idea of time became more apparent to me as everyday markers, such as meeting with friends and family, traveling or attending concerts vanished. 

Whilst writing Be Still the opening lines of TS Eliot’s Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets, came to mind: 

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable

British composer Daniel Kidane, the son of a Russian mother and an Eritrean father, was raised in London. His musical education began at the age eight, when he started playing the violin. He first received composition lessons at the Royal College of Music, and continued in St. Petersburg, taking lessons with Sergey Slonimsky. Subsequently, he attended Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music and the Guildhall School in London. He often cites musical influences as eclectic as “Olivier Messiaen and Bach, to Johnny Cash and Pantera.” His music – variously described as “quietly impressive,” “tautly constructed,” and “vibrantly imagined” — has been widely performed, both in the U.K. and abroad. In March of 2022, he will visit Milwaukee for the world premiere of Primitive Fire at the Milwaukee Art Museum, commissioned for Present Music by Nancy Laskin.

Andrew Hamilton: music for people who like art (2009)

Text:

1. Art is Art. Everything else is everything else.
2. Art-as-Art. Art from Art. Art on Art. Art of Art. Art for Art. Art beyond Art. Artless artifice.
13. Forms into uniform and formlessness. Style as recurrence.
14. Light as reappearance,dullness. Color as black, empty.
16. Verticality and horizontality, rectilineartity, parallelsim, stasis.
17. Outlines, monotones, blankness, quiescence, premeditation.
19. Matter only to the mind.
20. The strictest formula for the freest artistic freedom.
21. The easiest routine to the difficulty.
22. The most common mean to the most common end.
23. The extremely impersonal way for the truly personal.
24. The completest control for the purest spontaneity.
25. The most universal path to the most unique. And vice-versa.

from 25 Lines of Words on Art Statement by Ad Reinhardt

Andrew Hamilton was born in Dublin in 1977 and studied in Ireland, UK and The Netherlands with Kevin Volans, Anthony Gilbert and at the Koninklijk Conservatorium with Louis Andriessen. During the summer of 2019 his work was performed at the Tectonics and Tanglewood festivals.  In 2018 his first portrait album was released on the NMC label and in June 2020 a new solo disc was released on the Ergodos label. He was recently appointed composer-in-residence with Crash Ensemble and currently teaches at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

Sigur Rós: Gobbledigook (2008)

Sigur Rós is an Icelandic post-rock band from Reykjavík, active since 1994. Known for their ethereal sound, frontman Jónsi's falsetto vocals, and their use of bowed guitar, the band's music incorporates classical and minimal aesthetic elements, and the lyrics are often in the made-up language of Hopelandic.