Present Music presents

26 Little Deaths

June 23-24, 2022 | 7:30 pm Central Time
Jan Serr Studio | Milwaukee

Program

Traditional: Little Omie Wise

Ben Russell — violin and voice

Bryce Dessner: from Murder Ballades: Omie Wise

Don Sipe — conductor

Marcos Balter: Bladed Stance

Michael Clayville — conductor

David Lang: cheating, lying, stealing

Michael Clayville — conductor

INTERMISSION

Carla Kihlstedt: Twenty-Six Little Deaths (premiere)

Carla Kihlstedt — violin and voice
Roger Zahab — conductor

Inspired by “The Gashlycrumb Timies” written and illustrated by Edward Gorey 1963 Renewed 1991 The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust

Commissioned for Present Music’s 40th Anniversary Season by Two Sisters, Ronald Jacquart & Gary Van Wert, and Michael Schmale & David Bloom

Support Present Music today!

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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Credits

Present Music

David Bloom and Eric Segnitz — Co-Artistic Directors

Carla Kihlstedt — violin, voice and composer
Ben Russell — violin and voice
Eric Segnitz — violin
Erin Pipal — viola
Adrien Zitoun — cello
Greg Heintz — bass
Jennifer Clippert — flute
Bill Helmers — clarinet
Don Sipe — trumpet and conductor
Michael Clayville — trombone and conductor
John Orfe — piano
Carl Storniolo — percussion
Alex Wier — percussion
Roger Zahab — conductor
Marty Butorac — sound engineer

Staff:

Barbara Schneider — Operations Manager
Marty Butorac — Assistant 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
Barbara Boles
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

Alex Boyes
Michael Clayville
Peter Cressy
Katie Heil
Tom Howard
Dave Hulbert
Andrea and Tyko Kihlstedt
Russ Knutson
Rebecca Ottman
Mischa Premeau
Kelly Rippl
Ben Russell
Don Sipe
John Tanner
The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust
The Edward Gorey House
WaterStreet Creative
Roger Zahab

About the Guest Artist

Carla Kihlstedt

Composer, collaborator, violinist, singer, improviser, educator and instigator. Her musical voice is grounded in the economy and immediacy of song form, which allows her to explore complex worlds – the ocean, dreams, imaginary creatures, the machine age, quarantine – through many different lenses.

Carla’s music is a palimpsest, connecting and layering her divergent musical experiences. After graduating from the Oberlin Conservatory, she spent her 20s and 30s creating and performing music with bands/composers collectives including Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Tin Hat, 2 Foot Yard, Minamo The Book of Knots and Causing a Tiger. Aesthetically speaking, the Venn Diagram of these would all have only one thing in the shared center space: Carla. But they were united by three other things: their musical clarity, their commitment to collaboration, and the deep friendships that grounded them all. She came away from these years with a rich musical language that continues to feed her current work.

Carla has written for the International Contemporary Ensemble, Present Music, the San Francisco Girls Chorus, the Brooklyn
Youth Chorus, Variant 6, the ROVA Saxophone Quartet and the Dither Big Band. Her recent work, including Black Inscription (a Rabbit Rabbit Radio production), Herring Run and her upcoming international treble chorus project, Long for This World, investigate the natural world and our place in it. She is currently developing an international environmental project for treble chorus called Long for This World. (For more information, reach out to carla@longforthisworld.com.)

Carla has had the pleasure of playing and/or recording with many wonderful musicians/bands, including Tom Waits, Ben Goldberg, Trevor Dunn, Ches Smith, Anna Webber, Mary Halvorsen, Zeena Parkins, Tony Maimone, Tracy Chapman, Madeleine Peyroux, Mr. Bungle and Brooklyn Rider. She has also created soundtracks for choreographers Jo Krieter/Flyaway Productions, Shinichi Koga/inkBoat and Joe Goode Performance Group.

Carla lives on Cape Cod, MA with her two kids and her partner, Matthias Bossi. Along with Jeremy Flower and Jon Evans, they are the band Rabbit Rabbit Radio. RRR releases a work-in- progress song on the first day of every month to their subscribers at RabbitRabbitRadio.Bandcamp.com. At the end of the year they release the collection as an album. Currently they are working on Volume 6.

She is on the faculty of the Contemporary Improvisation Department of the New England Conservatory and the MFA in Composition program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has co-facilitated the Creative Gesture Lab for composers and choreographers at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and is a member of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps.immigration, Saporiti aims to allow audience members to sit with complication as music and visuals open doorways to difficult histories. Saporiti holds degrees from Berklee College of Music, University of Wyoming and Brown University and has worked with cultural institutions such as Lincoln Center, the LA Philharmonic, National Parks and Carnegie Hall.

About the Music

Bryce Dessner: Omie Wise

Bryce Dessner’s “Omie Wise” from his Murder Ballades suite, is loosely based on this classic tune, and draws on the sound of the clawhammer banjo and Appalachian fiddle styles often associated with this dark and grisly corner of American music.

Bryce Dessner (born 1976) is a composer, electric guitarist with The National, and artistic director, at home in many musical worlds. His compositions draw on elements of Baroque and folk music, late Romanticism and modernism, minimalism, and the blues.

Marcos Balter: Bladed Stance

Part Minimalist meditation and part spectral experimentation, Marcos Balter’s “Bladed Stance” creates uncanny sonic illusions which merge electronic and acoustic sound palettes. He creates this magic through the use of unusual instrumentation, extended instrumental techniques (even whistling!), reverb, and complex overlapping rhythms, with the pulse changing at each entrance. [The term ‘bladed stance’ refers to a martial arts posture, which allows one to block, move, and defend oneself easily].

Creator of unpredictable works, Marcos Balter’s output has been at once consistent and multifaceted. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1974, Balter underwent conservatory training in his home city and took private lessons in his late teens with José Antônio Rezende de Almeida Prado, a composer who had studied in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and at Darmstadt with György Ligeti. In 1996, having graduated from the Conservatório Brasileiro de Música, he moved to the United States to continue his education, first at Texas Christian University, then at Northwestern, where his main teacher was Jay Alan Yim. He then started his teaching career at Columbia College Chicago (2009-14) before joining the faculty at Montclair State University.

David Lang: cheating, lying, stealing

Ten years into it’s now 40-year existence, Present Music was part of a three- way Reader’s
Digest consortium which commissioned David Lang’s “cheating, lying, stealing”, and the
composer was in Milwaukee to introduce the piece. Here is what he said: “ ...I started
thinking about how so often, when classical composers write a piece of music, they are
trying to tell you something that they are proud of. Here’s this big gushing melody, see how
emotional I am. Or, here’s this abstract hard-to- figure-out piece, see how complicated I
am, see my really big brain. It’s interesting, but it’s not very humble. So I thought, what would
it be like if composers based pieces on what they thought was wrong with them? Like, here’s
a piece that shows you what a liar I am, what a cheater I am. In ‘’cheating, lying, stealing,’’ although
phrased in a comic way, I am trying to look at something dark. The instruction in the score says: Ominous funk”.

Pulitzer Prize winner David Lang is one of America’s most performed composers. Many of his works resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalogue is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling and very emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music. He is one of the founders of the Bang On a Can music collective in New York City.

Carla Kihlstedt: Twenty-Six Little Deaths

AMY

(instrumental)

BASIL

So soft your fur.
How gentle your purr.
You are smiling at me.
You’re my friend, I can see, aren’t you?

How wide your paws.
So drooly your jaws.
Are you smiling at me?
You’re my friend, I can see... aren’t you?

CLARA

Wasted my day.
I wasted my day.
Now I am wasting away.

DESMOND

(instrumental)

ERNEST

There’s never too much of a good thing. O, there’s never too much for me.
It all trickles down to the inside ground, but it’s never too much for me.

There’s never enough of a good thing.
O, there’s never enough for me.
It all rains down, floods the inside ground, but it’s never enough for me.

FANNY

Suck me dry where I stand. Whisper soft, take my hand.

Suck me dry through my skin, whisper soft, paper thin.

Turn me out, outside in.
I’ve no doubt you’re gonna win.

GEORGE

One, two, three, four, five...

Where can I hide?
Oh, where can I hide?
I’ve already hidden in the cupboard, behind the curtains, on top of the closet.

...nine, ten, eleven, twelve...

Where can I hide? Oh, where can I hide? I know! Shhh!!

I know where I’ll hide.
Oh, I know where I’ll hide.
Here under the rug, the rug,
the rug will hide me like an ocean

...eighteen, nineteen... (it’s so dark...) ...twenty! HERE I COME!! It’s so dark, so dark,

so very dark...

HECTOR

I’m waiting...
Waiting for the bus to come and lose control and hit me as soon as I least expect it to. So I’m always expecting it, hoping I’ll always be wrong.

I’m waiting...

Waiting for a thug to come and take me out.

I’ll put up a fight, I’ll scream and shout

and kick and bite but it won’t be enough.

My little old life will grind right to a permanent halt.

It’ll all be your fault.
Cuz you left me... waiting.

Waiting for a piano to fall from the sky,

I know if I look it’ll be there an inch from my face

& I won’t even have time to run

& the race of my life will be done in a flash.

Will it hurt?

Will the crash leave a dent in the earth?

Will the force of it push us clear out of our orbit

& send us careening through space?

Will there not be a trace of us left for the aliens?

I was hoping to find them.
I wanted to find them myself. I was waiting to find them.
I was waiting...
waiting...

IDA

It looks so inviting.
The shimmer must be fairies! They’re calling, they’re calling me, I hear them calling me...
Ida, Ida, Ida...

JAMES

This one’s for nerves and this is for flu. This is for when you don’t know what to do. This one will show you how it would be
to float up above the world.
DRINK IT, YOU’LL SEE!

This one tastes like a sock from the sea. This one smells a little like... pee.
This one, I really don’t know what it does. The only way to tell is to

DRINK IT, I’LL SEE!!

KATE

The moon, the moon is a sliver tonight, and the trees, I have never seen them looking so grand, looking so grand
as now...

LEO

I couldn’t help it. I knew it.
I really knew it. I blew it.

I really really blew it.
I knew it.
I shouldn’t have done it. But I couldn’t help it.
I couldn’t help myself!

MAUD

I am standing on water. I am buoyant and free! Look at me!
Look at me!

I’m standing on water!

I am away from everyone.
I am away from everything. I am just a way for the light to bounce back to the sky.

I am the winding.
I am the unwinding.
I am just the winding and the unwinding.

NEVILLE

Everything is the same.

I look out my window.

It’s the same as it was yesterday.

Same tree, same fence, same sky, same window, same me.

Everything is the same again. I look out my window.

It’s the same as it was yesterday and the day before.

Same tree, same fence, same sky, same window, same me.

Everything is the same again, again. I look out my window.

It’s the same as it was yesterday and the day before and the day before.

Same tree, same fence, same sky, same window, same me.

etc.

OLIVE

(instrumental)

PRUE

Knock, knock, ev’rybody just let me in! Stand back, I’m coming,
I don’t care what you say,
I’m just not going away.

Knock, knock, come on now, open the door!

It’s not my fault I’m still too close to the floor!

Knock, knock, open up please, Daddy, just open the door.

Knock, knock, can you hear me over the din?

I’m begging please, just let me join in the fun,

and I won’t bother noone.

Knock, knock, come on, now, open the door. It’s not that late, and anyway,
sleep’s such a bore.
Knock, knock...

Knock, knock, open up!

Is everything okay?
Knock, knock?
Knock, knock, open up please, Mama, just open the door!

QUENTIN

Quentin! Quentin!

No, no, no, no, no... Everything’s bringing me down. All I want is running and sky, and maybe a butterfly.

Quentin!

Stop!
Stop calling me back!

Everything is bringing me down.
All I want is music and playing and time. MORE TIME!
Uninterrupted time!

Quentin!

WHAT?!
What is it now?

Is it dinner or dishes or practicing, washing up,

I don’t care!
Leave me be!
Everything is bringing me down.

RHODA

(instrumental)

SUSAN

(words and melody by Viggo Bossi)

Mom! You need to let me watch a show! No! We are NOT building that fort!
We are not!

Mom?
No, NO! We are NOT building that fort!
You need to let me watch a show!
So WHERE ARE THE REMOTES?!
No! NO!!
You need to let me watch a show.
You need to let me.
Mom, you need to let me watch a show. You....
No, you are not building that stupid fort! You can not! NO!
We are not building it.
We’re not building it.
What are you thinking?
We’re not building it.
No! NO!!
Why did I even make that idea?
You’re not building a fort (the fort).
You’re not even building that fort.
Do not even think about it!
No!
Mom?
Mom?
Hi.
You let me watch a show today.
You need to.
Where are the remotes?
Where are they?
Where are they?
Where are the remotes?
No!
I’m watching a show!
Mom?
I’m trying to convince you to watch a show. Mom?
Mom?
Mom...
Mom?

TITUS

(instrumental)

UNA

(traditional camp song)

Una, where are you going? Upstairs to take a bath? Una, with legs like toothpicks and a neck like a giraffe.

Una filled up the bathtub,
Una pulled out the plug.
O my gracious, O my soul, there goes Una down the hole!

Glub, glub, glub, I don’t mean gurgle, glub, glub, glub.

VICTOR

Of all the wonders of the world, Mine’s the greatest one of all.
It glows brighter than the Taj Mahal, reaches farther than the Great Wall, this little wonder bright and small.

Of all the wonders of the world, Mine, it has me on a roll.
It’s deeper than the Great Blue Hole, but it begins to take it’s toll,
this silly wonder, dumb and small.

Standing on the track,
is this train ever coming back?
I wonder who it carries where?
I wonder why they’re going there?
Is this an endless loop?
Am I a figurine all dressed in green
to make the holiday display more real? I feel their giant eyes on me.

I wonder what is happiness?
I wonder what is life?
I wonder if this town will swallow me and if I’ll ever have a wife?
I don’t know what that means.
I’m not the author of my dreams.
I wonder why... I wonder why?

WINNIE

(instrumental)

XERXES

(instrumental)

YORICK

Are the clouds moving? Or is the tower falling... Falling slowly over me?

I feel so small.

Look at the ground to make sure it’s still there.

Hello, little ant!
To you, I’m the tower.
To the tower, I’m the ant.
To the mountain, I’m just a speck and the tower is a mere crayon balanced precariously.

But from space, the mountain is only The Braille of the earth
and I am just a mote...
not even

not even not even

ZILLAH

Well, it’s you and me,
and Dolly makes three. We’ve been here and there. We’ve gone from A to Z.

It’s been a harrowing day.
A doozy, don’t you say?
I know what you’re thinking: Let’s cut straight to the drinking.

‘Cuz even if you’re not really real, you know how I feel.
You’re alive inside me. Sometimes I can’t tell us apart.

And even though your head’s full of fluff, I just can’t get enough
of your take on the day.
With you, I can take on the world! Here’s to us! Fill’er up!

Pour another drop into your little tea cup.

When I’m with you, nothing could be wrong and we always get along so well,

I don’t even know which one of us is singing this song.

If it weren’t for you, I’d surely sink.
You’ve pulled me back again from the brink. But now that we’re safe again,
Let’s pour another drink again.

So, even though we’re not really real, I know how you feel.
I’m alive inside you.
I can’t even tell us apart.

And even though my head’s full of fluff, I just can’t get enough
of your take on the day.
With you, I can take on the world! Here’s to us! Fill’er up!

Pour another drop into your little tea cup.

26 Little Deaths

Program

Support Present Music today!

Sponsors

Credits

Present Music

Additional Credits

Special Thanks

About the Guest Artist

Carla Kihlstedt

About the Music

Bryce Dessner: Omie Wise

Marcos Balter: Bladed Stance

David Lang: cheating, lying, stealing

Carla Kihlstedt: Twenty-Six Little Deaths