Present Music presents

REALITY CHECK

Saturday, October 24, 2020 | 7:30 pm CDT
Present Music Digital Stage

Program

Gil Scott-Heron (arr. Jonathan Goldsmith): The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1970)
Sheri Williams Pannell — narrator

Emma O’Halloran: Constellations (2018)
Sarah Brailey — soprano

Klassik (arr. David Bloom): Reality Check and Spirit (2019)
Klassik — voice

David T. Little: sweet light crude (2007)
Sarah Brailey — soprano

Frederic Rzewski: Coming Together (1970)
Klassik — narrator

Present Music’s 2020-2021 Season, Limitless, is made possible with generous support from the United Performing Arts Fund, the sponsorship of Saint John’s on the Lake, and grants from the Milwaukee Arts Board 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 and saxophones
Don Sipe — trumpet
Carl Storniolo — percussion
Derek Johnson — electric guitar
Marianne Parker — piano
Eric Segnitz — violin
Adrien Zitoun — cello
Andrew Raciti — contrabass and electric bass
David Bloom — conductor

Videography

Video produced by TankThink

Shot by:
Kelly Anderson
Alvin Connor, Jr.
Pat McDonnell
Ryan Sarnowski
Wes Tank

Filmed at Interstate Parking Brewery Garage, Milwaukee, WI

About the guest artists

"More than nearly any other musician in the Milwaukee scene, Klassik wears many hats: rapper, soul man, producer, collaborator, mentor, keeper of the American songbook. His modernist, jazz-saturated compositions are unlike anything else coming out of the city, but he has a gift for more traditional styles as well. Regardless of which side of the booth he’s on, he’s a force.”

— Evan Rytlewski, from a Shepherd Express citation on winning the journal’s 2018 Best of Milwaukee Rap-Hip Hop Producer for the third consecutive year

Klassik is a multi-instrumentalist, producer, and performer who is as dexterous a rapper as he is an impassioned and soulful singer and a unique, unbridled storyteller. A Milwaukee native, he was voted Milwaukee’s best Rap-Hip Hop Producer for the Shepherd Express for three consecutive years, and his most recent album (QUIET, 2019) was named the Album of the Year by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Radio Milwaukee Music Awards. Klassik has opened for such artists as Ludacris, Talib Kweli, Kendrick Lamar, Banks, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and Rakim. A true class act, Klassik works to stir the souls of listeners into action with empathy, passion, and purpose through his own self-reflective sonic art.

Sarah Brailey enjoys a career filled with a plethora of diverse projects including soloing in Handel’s Messiah with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, performing with Kanye West and Roomful of Teeth at the Hollywood Bowl, and singing John Zorn in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. She has been hailed by The New York Times for her “radiant, liquid tone,” “exquisitely phrased,” and “sweetly dazzling singing” and by Opera UK for “a sound of remarkable purity.” Brailey has performed with the Bach Society of Minnesota, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, Colorado Symphony, Handel and Haydn Society, Lorelei Ensemble, Clarion Choir, NOVUS NY, Trinity Baroque Orchestra, tUne-yArDs, and many others. In 2019, Sarah sang the role of the Soul on the premiere recording of Dame Ethel Smyth’s symphony, The Prison, with The Experiential Orchestra. Born in southwestern Wisconsin, she is co-founder of Just Bach, a monthly concert series in Madison, where she is co-host of Musica Antiqua on 89.9 FM and the Artistic Director of the Handel Aria Competition.

Sheri Williams Pannell is a native Milwaukeean who has performed, directed or written for a number of Milwaukee’s theater and arts organizations including Bronzeville Arts Ensemble, First Stage, Florentine Opera, Milwaukee Chamber Theater, Milwaukee Fringe Festival, Milwaukee Rep, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Milwaukee Arts Museum, and Skylight Music Theatre. Beyond Milwaukee, Pannell has worked at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Utah’s Old Lyric Theatre, Children’s Theater of Madison, University Opera and University Theater at UW Madison. Pannell was honored to direct a production as part of the United Nations Conference on Genocide, hosted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2017, Pannell was honored as an Artist of the Year by the City of Milwaukee. A founding member and artistic director at Bronzeville Arts Ensemble, Pannell is also a director/teaching artist at Black Arts MKE and co-director of the drama ministry at Calvary Baptist Church.  Summer of 2020, Pannell served as one of the founders of the Milwaukee Black Theatre Festival.  A graduate of Spelman College, Pannell also holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

About the music

Gil Scott-Herron: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1970)

“Gil Scott-Heron is frequently called the ‘godfather of rap,’ which is an epithet he didn’t really care for. In 1968, when he was nineteen, he wrote a satirical spoken-word piece called The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. It was released on a very small label in 1970 and was probably heard of more than heard, but it had a following. It is the species of classic that sounds as subversive and intelligent now as it did when it was new, even though some of the references—Spiro Agnew, Natalie Wood, Roy Wilkins, Hooterville—have become dated. By the time Scott-Heron was twenty-three, he had published two novels and a book of poems and recorded three albums, each of which prospered modestly, but The Revolution Will Not Be Televised made him famous.”

— Alec Wilkinson, from an article in The New Yorker

Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011) was a soul and jazz poet, musician, and author, known primarily for his work as a spoken-word performer. His own term for himself was “bluesologist, a scientist who is concerned with the origin of the blues.” He also described himself as “a Black man dedicated to expression; expression of the joy and pride of Blackness.” His music, most notably on the albums Pieces of a Man and Winter in America in the early 1970s, cast a large shadow, influencing many artists work. Scott-Heron remained active until his death, and he received a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. In 1980, Scott-Heron and Stevie Wonder fronted a petition demanding the commemoration of the birthday of civil rights leader Martin Luther King with a national holiday. The petition was signed by 6 million people, and in November 1983 Reagan signed the bill creating a federal holiday. Scott-Heron told NPR in 2008 that the holiday served as a “time for people to reflect on how far we have come, and how far we still have to go, in terms of being just people. Hopefully it will be a time for people to reflect on the folks that have done things to get us to where we are and where we're going.”

Emma O’Halloran: Constellations (2018)

“I was basically unaware that women could actually even be composers until like my early twenties, and someone came back to me and said, ‘This is crazy, you must have been born and lived in a cave for this to have happened.’ And I just started thinking about what it would have been like to live in a cave. I started reading a lot, all these different articles about cave people, and I came across this National Geographic article that was discussing recent discoveries that the majority of the art, the cave drawings in these old places, had been created by women. That just really struck me, in such a male-dominated world: if you go back, there are all these women just making art for the sake of art. I thought that was really beautiful.

“So that was the idea, and seeing all those hand prints, seeing pictures of them, they just looked like constellations to me. That’s what inspired the piece. And then the piece became about what it was like for me. It feels like a time-travel piece, where I’m thinking about when I was a kid, and when you think you can do anything as a child, and then as you get a little bit older maybe realizing that that’s not possible. And I feel like that’s me working through how I struggled to figure out how I could be a composer, and then going further back and taking strength from the art that was created by these women, and thinking that, well, you can do anything you want to do. You just have to do it. It’s a bit grand.”

— Emma O’Halloran, from a National Sawdust Log interview with Angélica Negrón

Emma O’Halloran is an Irish composer and vocalist. Freely intertwining acoustic and electronic music, O’Halloran has written for folk musicians, chamber ensembles, turntables, laptop orchestra, symphony orchestra, film, opera, and theatre. Her work has been performed by Crash Ensemble, Contemporaneous, Khemia Ensemble, ~Nois Saxophone Quartet, the Refugee Orchestra Project, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, amongst others. O’Halloran was recently named a 2020 MacDowell Fellow, and an artist-in-residence at Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. She holds a PhD in Music Composition from Princeton University. Read and listen more at the composer’s website.

Klassik: Reality Check and Spirit (2019)

“Quiet isn’t the absence of noise, but rather the absence of undesirable, disruptive, or in the case of the album, ignorant and boisterous distractions. The album is inspired by the sounds of nature in one of our county parks. I was with a group of friends hanging out by the river, and then at this mysterious moment, everyone just stopped talking. We were at the riverbank and you could just hear the water, being almost still. It was this eerie sensation for me; it felt important. That next morning, I woke up with the word ‘quiet’ on the tip of my tongue. The sound of the wind in the leaves, the sound of the barely-moving water, I knew then almost four years ago that I wanted to replicate those sounds. That was quiet to me, and it felt peaceful. Peace and quiet are very synonymous for me, and you hear that throughout the album. It’s that intention that keeps it from being ‘extra’ or ‘noise’ per se; I believe that things done intentionally make much more of an impact with far less fanfare and noise. Forces and features of nature have existed and will exist for centuries more, and they just are, so quietly. That’s powerful to me.”

— Klassik, from a Radio Milwaukee interview with Evan Rytlewski

Both Reality Check and Spirit were released on Quiet, Klassik’s 2019 album on Confluence Records. The album was named Album of the Year by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Radio Milwaukee Music Awards.

David T. Little: sweet light crude (2007)

“Sweet Light Crude is about love and addiction; about misery; about the perversity of loving your captor. It’s a love song to oil.”

— David T. Little

“For me, the art has always had to come first. I wasn’t willing to compromise that. I’m an artist, not a politician. While I want my work to engage in the political, I have no interest in creating work that serves only as a vessel for delivering a political message. The world has enough pundits.”

— David T. Little, from a New York Times article by the composer

David T. Little is “one of the most imaginative young composers” on the scene (The New Yorker), with “a knack for overturning musical conventions” (The New York Times). His operas Dog Days, JFK, and Vinkensport (librettos by Royce Vavrek), and Soldier Songs have been widely acclaimed, “prov[ing] beyond any doubt that opera has both a relevant present and a bright future” (The New York Times). Little’s music has been presented by the LA Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, LA Opera, Park Avenue Armory, Lincoln Center Festival, Kennedy Center, Holland Festival, Opéra de Montréal, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Little is currently composing a new monodrama based on Garth Greenwell’s celebrated novel What Belongs to You and developing a new work commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theater. Read and listen more at the composer’s website.

Frederic Rzewski: Coming Together (1971)

“As I read it I was impressed both by the poetic quality of the text and by its cryptic irony. I read it over and over again. It seemed that I was trying both to capture a sense of the physical presence of the writer, and at the same time to unlock a hidden meaning from the simple but ambiguous language. The act of reading and rereading finally led me to the idea of a musical treatment.”

— Frederic Rzewski, about Sam Melville’s 1971 letter from Attica Correctional Facility

Mark Swed calls Frederic Rzewski “the greatest pianist-composer of our time and something of a legend in modern music.” He studied with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Milton Babbitt at Harvard and Princeton Universities and later in Italy with Luigi Dallapiccola. Rzewski’s early friendship with Christian Wolff and David Behrman, and his acquaintance with John Cage and David Tudor strongly influenced his development in both composition and performance. In Rome in the mid-sixties, together with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum, he formed MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva), which quickly became known for its pioneering work in live electronics and improvisation. In 1977, Rzewski became Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liège, Belgium.