Present Music presents

Out with the Cold,
In with the New

Friday, March 26, 2021 | 7:30 pm CST
Present Music Digital Stage

Generously sponsored by Jan Serr and John Shannon

Program

Paul Wiancko: LIFT: excerpt from Part III (2016)

John Cage & Gertrude Stein: from Living Room Music: II. Story (1940)

Hans Abrahamsen: Winternacht (1978, arr. 1987)

I. Winternacht (Winter Night) — to Georg Trakl
II. Drei Welten (Three Worlds) — to M.C. Escher
III. Septet — to Igor Stravinsky
IV. Im Frühling (In Spring) — Georg Trakl

Erik Satie, arr. David Bloom: from Furniture Music: Wrought-Iron Tapestry (1917, arr. 2021)

Philip Glass & Paul Simon, arr. Jeremy Marchant: from Songs from Liquid Days: Changing Opinion (1985)
Elenna Sindler — voice

Reena Esmail: Tasveer (2012)

Ben Patterson: Paper Piece (1960)

Andy Akiho: NO one To kNOW one (2010)
Elenna Sindler — voice

Caroline Shaw: And So (2019)
Elenna Sindler — voice

Joseph Byrd: Prelude to The Mystery Cheese-Ball (1961)

Angélica Negrón: bubblegum grass / peppermint field (2011)
A. Bill Miller — live liquid light show

Sponsors

Out with the Cold, In with the New is sponsored by Jan Serr and John Shannon; venue sponsorship was provided by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts. 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, 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.

Credits

Guest Artists

Elenna Sindler — voice
A. Bill Miller — liquid light show

Present Music

David Bloom and Eric Segnitz — Co-Artistic Directors

Jennifer Clippert — flutes
William Helmers — clarinets
Carl Storniolo — percussion, voice, paper, balloon
Alex Weir — steel pan
John Orfe — piano
Marty Butorac — keyboard, toy piano, balloon
Nathan Wysock — guitar
Sharan Leventhal — violin
Eric Segnitz — violin, voice, paper, balloon
Erin Pipal — viola
Adrien Zitoun — cello, voice, paper, balloon
David Bloom — conductor, voice, melodica, paper

About the Guest Artists

Elenna Sindler

Elenna Sindler, born and raised in the Chicago area, is a performer-composer whose work bridges multiple genres and disciplines through a feminist lens. In 2018, she wrote and devised a performance piece for Collaboraction’s Theater's Peacebook festival, exploring how survivors of sexual violence navigate public transit. This piece was chosen by Infusion Productions to be performed in their Mother Moon Festival in NYC (spring 2019). She is currently developing a vacuum cleaner opera installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) with absurdist director, dado, for the Storefront Project.

As a contemporary classical vocalist, she has worked with Lucy Dhegrae at soundSCAPE (Cesena, Italy) and performed works by composers Kaija Saariaho, Meredith Monk, Jason Eckardt, Shawn Jaeger, Marco Taralli, and Katherine Young. She has worked with such ensembles as Ensemble Dal Niente, eighth blackbird, Quince, Fonema Consort, Studio MusikFabrik, NON-op, and Brooklyn Metro Chamber Orchestra and appeared on festivals such as EarTaxi, Omaha Under the Radar, and Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Darmstadt, Germany). A versatile singer of many genres, she won a YoungArts Merit Award for Popular Voice and released a singer-songwriter album called When I Was in 2016.

A. Bill Miller

A. Bill Miller, also known as ‘gridworks1,’ has exhibited and screened his animated videos, abstract ASCII drawings, animated GIFs, and web browser-based compositions nationally and internationally. Bill also performs and experiments with live audio/visuals using custom software patches in traditional gallery exhibitions as well as Art, Technology, and Music Festivals.

About the Music

John Cage: from Living Room Music: II. Story (1940)

“Everything we do is music.” ― John Cage

Living Room Music is an early John Cage score that demonstrates the evolution of his idea that the most ordinary sounds of everyday life can be music. The first and last movements of this piece are to be played on household objects, such as magazines, a table, books, or the floor, or using household architectural “objects,” such as window frames. The text of the second movement (featured tonight) is from Gertrude Stein’s book The World is Round.

John Cage was an American composer, artist, and philosopher. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde and arguably among the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

Hans Abrahamsen: Winternacht (1978, arr. 1987)

“In a piece like Winternacht, it is again about the seasons. But here actually, the first movement is winter, and then it goes backwards to autumn, and then to summer, and the last movement is spring. So coming from the first movement, it is actually going forwards from winter to spring, and that is always important for me, that somehow it seems that we go backwards, but actually we go forwards. It represents feelings of cold, warm, movement, growing, decaying; all kinds of things that, for me, is in my music, and has been there since I started writing.” — Hans Abrahamsen

Winternacht (Winter Night) was written in 1976-78 and the title was taken from a poem by the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. The four movements, which are all very precise and dreamingly poetic, are almost classical in terms of clarity and discipline in orchestration and form: hence the dedication of the third movement to Igor Stravinsky. However, the music has a strong impressionistic quality as well: four introverted still lives of the velvety, dark iciness of a silvery winter night (one can veritably sense the fairy-tale-like sleigh ride in the two outer movements). The second movement is dedicated to the eccentric lithographer M.C. Escher and the first and last movements are both dedicated to Georg Trakl.

Hans Abrahamsen first got to know music through playing the French horn at school in Copenhagen. His music is inspired by his mentors Per Nørgård and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, who were two of his composition teachers, and in the 1980s he became close both personally and stylistically to György Ligeti. Abrahamsen is considered to have been part of a trend called the New Simplicity, which arose in the mid-1960s as a reaction against the complexity and perceived aridity of the Central European avant-garde. His extended chamber work Schnee (Snow) is regarded as one of the rare classics of the 21st-Century.

Erik Satie: from Furniture Music: Wrought-Iron Tapestry (1917)

“I came into the world very young, in an age that was very old.” ― Erik Satie

Erik Satie was an influential artist in the late 19th- and early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde. His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music, and the Theatre of the Absurd, while his 1917 coinage “furniture music” would presage the development of background and ambient music.

An eccentric, Satie was introduced as a “gymnopedist" in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous works, the piano compositions Gymnopédies. Later, he also referred to himself as a “phonometrician” (meaning “someone who measures sounds”), preferring this designation to that of “musician,” after having been called “a clumsy but subtle technician” in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911. After his death, Satie's friends discovered his apartment chaotically filled not only with unsorted papers and miscellaneous items, but also over over 100 umbrellas and two grand pianos placed one on top of the other, the upper instrument used as storage for letters and parcels.

Philip Glass: from Songs from Liquid Days: Changing Opinion (1985)

“If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new. As long as you know what you’re doing, nothing much of interest is going to happen.” ― Philip Glass

With lyrics by Paul Simon, Changing Opinion is the first movement of Philip Glass’ cycle Songs from Liquid Days, which also features songs with lyrics by Suzanne Vega, David Byrne, and Laurie Anderson. Changing Opinion is a mock-solemn meditation on the possible sources of an electrical hum in a room.

Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times through his operas, symphonies, compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as The Hours and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, while Koyaanisqatsi, his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since Fantasia.

Reena Esmail: Tasveer (2012)

“I use my platform as a composer to bring people together who are very unlikely to interact with one another outside of a piece of music that I would create.” — Reena Esmail

Tasveer marks a very special point for me as a composer. For a year between 2011-2012, I was living in India on a Fulbright grant, studying Hindustani classical music. My days there were filled with music, between Hindustani vocal lessons, attending concerts, constantly meeting new musicians and playing with them. I was so busy taking in everything around me that I barely composed anything for an entire year.

Tasveer was the first piece I wrote after returning from India. It is in this piece that I began to confront the dramatic shifts that had taken place in my musical perception over that very formative year, and began to scratch the surface of the ideas and concepts that now form the backbone of the music I write. The concept of this piece is simple: a trill is passed back and forth between instruments, expanding and condensing, pulling and pushing time, and becoming densely melodically ornamented while retaining it’s harmonic transparency. Hindustani ornamentation is so beautiful and ephemeral, and this was one of my first attempts to capture these little wisps of sound on the page.

— Reena Esmail

Indian-American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music. Esmail holds degrees in composition from Juilliard and Yale and has studied Hindustani music extensively in India. She has been Composer-in-Residence with Los Angeles Master Chorale, Seattle Symphony, and Street Symphony, where she works with communities experiencing homelessness and incarceration in Los Angeles. Esmail’s work has been commissioned by ensembles including Kronos Quartet, Imani Winds, Richmond Symphony, Town Music Seattle,  Albany Symphony, Chicago Sinfonietta,  River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, and San Francisco Girls Chorus.

Ben Patterson: Paper Piece (1960)

Ben Patterson was an American musician, artist, and one of the founders of the experimental performance art movement known as Fluxus. During a 1960 stay in Germany, Patterson wrote a letter to his parents in Pittsburgh containing the score for his recent composition Paper Piece. A radically new direction for the young, classically trained double bassist, the work instructed five performers to “shake, break, tear, crumple, rumple, bumple, rub, scrub, twist, poof, and pop” various sheets of paper. Unable to return home for Christmas, Patterson hoped his family would find joy and amusement in performing the piece in his absence with wrapping paper from opened gifts. This early iteration of Paper Piece, which would become a standard at Fluxus festivals in the 1960s and ’70s, encapsulates the spirit of generosity, and the pursuit of easily accessible materials and processes, that would guide Patterson’s performance and visual art to follow.

Andy Akiho: NO one To kNOW one (2010)

“I love being out of my comfort zone, so my comfort zone is being out of it.” — Andy Akiho

With a striking, original text, Akiho’s NO one To kNOW one is full of intricate rhythms and exotic timbres inspired by his primary instrument, the steel pan.

Described as “trailblazing” (LA Times) and “an imaginative composer” (NY Times), Andy Akiho is a composer and performer of new music. ​Recent engagements include commissioned premieres by the New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Symphony, China Philharmonic, Guangzhou Symphony, Oregon Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, LA Dance Project, and experimental opera company The Industry. Akiho has been recognized with many prestigious awards and organizations including the Rome Prize, Lili Boulanger Memorial Prize, Fromm Commission, Barlow Endowment, New Music USA, and Chamber Music America. Akiho is also an active steel pannist and performs his compositions with various ensembles worldwide.

Caroline Shaw: And So (2019)

“I’m still kind of figuring out what the music is that I like to write. Every chance you get [to compose] is a chance to discover something new about yourself.” — Caroline Shaw

And So is part of a three-song trilogy Caroline Shaw wrote for mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra; tonight’s performance features a reduction for voice with string quartet. The lyrics are a combination of her own, interwoven with those of Gertrude Stein, Robert Burns, Billy Joel, and Shakespeare.

Caroline Shaw is a New York-based musician, vocalist, violinist, composer, and producer. She was the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 for Partita for 8 Voices, written for the Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a member. Recent commissions include new works for Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Sō Percussion, the LA Philharmonic, and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with John Lithgow. She has produced for Kanye West and Nas and has contributed to records by The National, and Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry.

Paul Wiancko: LIFT: excerpt from Part III (2016)

“When you’re writing for chamber musicians, there’s a sense of just absolute freedom in the process that’s addictive.” — Paul Wiancko

Composer Paul Wiancko describes his string quartet LIFT as “an investigation of elation in musical form” as he “joyously explores the capacity for harmony, color, and rhythm itself to evoke and inspire.”

Paul Wiancko has led an exceptionally multifaceted musical life as a composer and cellist. As a performer, he has collaborated with Midori, Yo-Yo Ma, Richard Goode, Mitsuko Uchida, Nico Muhly, Chick Corea, Etta James, Norah Jones, Max Richter, The National, Dirty Projectors, Wye Oak, and many others. In 2009, he joined the award-winning Harlem Quartet, with whom he spent 3 years performing and teaching extensively worldwide. Paul currently writes and performs as a member of Owls, Ayane & Paul, and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. Paul has been commissioned by the Aizuri, Parker, St. Lawrence, Kronos, Eybler, and Attacca Quartets, yMusic, Alexi Kenney, Tessa Lark, David Byrd-Marrow, and the Raleigh Civic Symphony.

Joseph Byrd: Prelude to The Mystery Cheese-Ball (1961)

“It was like being in the presence of a god, and I simply drank in whatever he [John Cage] had to say.” — Joseph Byrd

The Mystery Cheese-Ball is a mock chamber opera written for performance in Yoko Ono’s loft in 1961.

Joseph Byrd is an American composer, musician and academic. After first becoming known as an experimental composer in New York City and Los Angeles in the early and mid-1960s, he became the leader of The United States of America, an innovative band that integrated electronic sound and radical political ideas into rock music. In 1968 he recorded the album The American Metaphysical Circus, credited to Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies. After working as a record producer, arranger, and soundtrack composer, he became a university teacher in music history and theory.

Angélica Negrón: bubblegum grass / peppermint field (2011)

“[Writing music is] about the ability to fully be who you are. No hesitation or fear of expressing yourself. It’s about freedom.” — Angélica Negrón

“A lot of my music is about the desire of being in a different time and place than the one I'm currently in. For bubblegum grass / peppermint field, I was inspired by the idea of daydreaming and escaping to my own personal made up land. This piece was originally written for string quartet with an electronic gamelan ensemble modeled after a Balinese Gong Kebyar. The electronics consist of acoustic samples of found objects in my apartment and also micro-samples from some of my previous pieces reflecting my interest in capturing and retaining different moments in time through my music. For tonight’s performance, the electronic gamelan part is pre-recorded.”

— Angélica Negrón

Angélica Negrón is a Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist who writes music for accordions, robotic instruments, toys, and electronics as well as chamber ensembles and orchestras. She has been commissioned by the Albany Symphony, Bang on a Can All-Stars, A Far Cry, MATA Festival, loadbang, The Playground Ensemble and the American Composers Orchestra, among others. Her music has been performed at the Kennedy Center, the Ecstatic Music Festival, EMPAC, and the 2016 New York Philharmonic Biennial, and her film scores have been heard numerous times at the Tribeca Film Festival. She has collaborated with artists such as Sō Percussion, The Knights, Face the Music and NOVUS NY, among others and is a founding member of the electronic indie band Balún.

Lyrics

John Cage: from Living Room Music: II. Story (1940)

text by Gertrude Stein

excerpt from The World is Round (1939)
Chapter 1: Rose Is a Rose

Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around.

Philip Glass: from Songs from Liquid Days: Changing Opinion (1985)

text by Paul Simon

Andy Akiho: NO one To kNOW one (2010)

text by Andy Akiho

No
one to…
No one. One, two.
I know no one. One… two.
No one to lose my sense of direction.
I know…I know one too. I falleN TwO. I am no one too.
I am no one to give my two cents,
since I lost my sense of direction.
You know when to… know one.
No way to know one way.
No way to win when
there’ s no one
to lose.

C.R.A.F.T… when dreams interrupt this dark reality.
Quand le rêves interrompent cette réalité sombre…

I can sense my direction. Can you find my way?
I remember. I don’t know my direction since you lost it.
Correction… I can sense your way. Lost a sense of direction.
Since I have no direction, whenever you say go… I follow.
I follow… and every time I follow you, I fall in two.

Now I’ve fallen too. Now I know. I know you

Caroline Shaw: And So (2019)

text by Caroline Shaw after Robert Burns, Gertrude Stein, Billy Joel, and Shakespeare

would a song by another name
sound as sweet and true
would all the reds be just the same
or violets as blue
if you were gone would words still flow
and would they rhyme with you
if you were gone would i still know
how to love and how to grow
and how the vowel threads through.

and so they say the saying goes
a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a tired rhyme
but in the verse there’s always time.

would scansion cease to mark the beats
if i went away
would a syllable interrupt the feet
of tetrametric iambs
when i am gone
listen
and i will sing a tune of love and life and of the ocean’s prose and the poetry of a
red,
red,
rose,
that’s newly sprung in june.

and so you say the saying goes
a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
is a rose
is a rose
is how I’m
keeping track of time.

when a’ the seas rise high, my dear
and the rocks melt with the sun
will the memory of us
still rhyme with anyone
will we still tune our violins
will we still sing of roses will
we exist at all, my love,
or will we fade to stanzas of
the dust that i suppose is
all we were and all we’ll be.

and so the saying “so it goes”
depends a lot on if a rose is a rose is a rose is rose
is a rose is a rose is a rose is a thing sublime
and so we stay, on borrowed time.