Composer Eve Beglarian was inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem and a piece of birch bark to create A Murmur in the Trees, a 30-minute work that features 24 double bass players spread throughout a grove of trees. The birch bark is used as a musical score that determines the sounds the basses create and where the players are located. The audience is welcomed to walk throughout the forest to hear the music from different places, hearing some basses nearby and some quite far away.
Performances
Friday, August 5, 2022 at 7 p.m.
Barringer Family Farms: N5000 860th St Ellsworth, WI 54011 Featuring a poetry reading by Thomas R. Smith Free, but please RSVP here Friday, Sept. 23, 2022 at 6 p.m. Caponi Art Park: 1220 Diffley Rd, Eagan, MN 55123 Featuring a poetry reading by Emilio DeGrazia Free Saturday, April 22, 2023 at 5 p.m. Gustavus Adolphus College Arboretum: 800 W College Ave, St Peter, MN 56082 Free, more information A Murmur in the Trees performances are free, but your donation helps compensate the performing artists and makes events like these possible. Thank you!
According to the Los Angeles Times, composer and performer Eve Beglarian is a “humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist.” A 2017 winner of the Alpert Award in the Arts for her “prolific, engaging and surprising body of work,” she has also been awarded the 2015 Robert Rauschenberg Prize from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts for her “innovation, risk-taking, and experimentation.”
Beglarian’s current projects include a collaboration with writer/performer Karen Kandel and writer/director Mallory Catlett about women in Vicksburg from the Civil War to the present, a piece for twenty-four double basses in a grove of trees, and a song cycle setting texts by and about mid-20th-century women for the Brooklyn Art Song Society. Since 2001, she has been creating A Book of Days, “a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress…an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.” (Los Angeles Times) In 2009, “Ms. Beglarian kayaked and bicycled the length of the Mississippi River [and] has translated her findings into music of sophisticated rusticity. [Her] new Americana song cycle captures those swift currents as vividly as Mark Twain did. The works waft gracefully on her handsome folk croon and varied folk instrumentation as mysterious as their inspiration.” (New York Times) Performance projects include Brim, Songs from a Book of Days, The Story of B, Open Secrets, Hildegurls’ Ordo Virtutum, twisted tutu, and typOpera. Recordings of Eve’s music are available on ECM, Koch, New World, Canteloupe, Innova, Naxos, Kill Rock Stars, CDBaby, and Bandcamp. 
Emilio DeGrazia
I was born and raised in Dearborn, Michigan (Detroit then was still an elegant city), the youngest (and only son) of parents who immigrated to the U.S. from southern Italy in 1936. My formative years were spent in the shadow of Dearborn’s enormous Ford Rouge Plant, where my father spent 33 years laboring in the coke ovens and open hearth. The factory left a deep impression, as did the ordinary folk who people my writings. On a lovely June evening in 1969 I was awed when I first saw the Mississippi open into view. Rumors of clean air and water had brought me north, as did a job teaching English at Winona State University. I fell in love with the area, and it’s been home ever since. There is much to love, preserve and develop in this part of the Driftless Region. I began publishing poetry and creative prose in 1973, and founded Great River Review, a literary journal, in 1977. Since then I have written and published work in several genres. Indeed I am one of the fortunate ones. For years spent in the classroom I received salary for doing what I love and must do: Read, teach, and write. As writer I am both amateur and professional: “Amateur” in that I do my writing as a lover would––for the love of it; “professional” in the sense that I believe that literature should have something to profess, and that good writers should be paid for their work. 
Thomas R. Smith was born and raised in northern Wisconsin close to the natural beauty of his native Chippewa River, where he grew toward an awareness of the life-preserving values of the land’s original inhabitants. He is an internationally published poet, essayist, editor, and teacher. His work has appeared in multitudinous journals and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and abroad. Garrison Keillor has featured his poetry on The Writer’s Almanac and former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser has selected his poems for his syndicated column, American Life in Poetry. He is author of ten books of poems, most recently Storm Island (Red Dragonfly Press, 2020) and Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications). He teaches poetry at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and posts poems and essays on his web site at www.thomasrsmithpoet.com. It was his privilege to perform with Zeitgeist in the mid 1980s. He lives on the South Fork of the Kinnickinnic River in River Falls with his wife Krista Spieler and cats Violet and Lou.
Barringer Family Farms is a third generation family farm located in the verdant Trimbelle River valley in western Wisconsin. They grow certified organic vegetables, hay, CBD hemp products, present arts and education events, and host community celebrations.
Barringer Family Farms centers the production of healthy and delicious food in a sustainable manner that nourishes our customers, improves our land, and connects with community. Their food can be purchased at local farmer's markets, through a CSA, online, or at the farm. 
Caponi Art Park, located on 60-acres of rolling, wooded hills that are embedded with art in Eagan, Minnesota, is a distinctive community space offering cultural and educational experiences in an inviting, natural setting.
Designed as a single, unified work of art the meandering trails follow the topography of the grounds like contour drawings animated by everyone who walks them, and the rock walls and shaped hills are the sculpture into which conventional works are integrated. The Park has miles of walking paths, a sculpture garden, outdoor amphitheater — the Theater in the Woods — as well as spaces for reflection and relaxation.
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