Here and There 2025 Program Notes |
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Zeitgeist
Heather Barringer and Patti Cudd, percussion; Pat O’Keefe and David Milne, woodwinds No Exit New Music Ensemble Sean Gabriel, flute; Gunnar Hirthe, clarinets; Cara Tweed, violin; James Rhodes, viola; Nick Diodore, cello; Katalin Le Favre, percussion; Robert Kovacs, piano; Shuai Weng, piano; Timothy Beyer, Artistic Director; James Praznik, Associate Director Artist Statement: Throughout our history, Zeitgeist has championed the work of composers in our community, commissioning, developing, and premiering hundreds of works by Minnesota composers. Cleveland based No Exit New Music Ensemble boasts a similar passion with regard to their local artists. Both groups recognize that while creating work with artists near at hand is essential to creating a vibrant musical community, our work also becomes richer when we welcome new ideas into our midst, and increases in its impact when we share it with audiences near and far. Here and There is part of an artistic partnership between Zeitgeist and No Exit through which we will engage in the import and export of musical ideas between our two communities. Both ensembles will present in both states, performing and developing work by Minnesota and Ohio composers and introducing audiences and artists to new musical possibilities. Together, we’ll learn more about what makes each place unique, what we have in common, how we differ, what we can share, and what we might take away. Notes & Bios
Since its inception, the idea behind No Exit’ has been to serve as an outlet for the commission and performance of contemporary avant-garde concert music. Now in our 16th season and with well over 350 commissions to date, we have strived to create exciting, meaningful and thought-provoking programs; always with the philosophy of bringing the concert hall to the community (not the other way around) and by presenting our programs in a manner which allows for our audience to really connect with the experience………free and open to the public in every sense.
In addition to our activities as a performing ensemble and commissioning organization, we produce an annual series of concerts, via No Exit Presents, that showcase some of the most singular and compelling performers and ensembles from around the world and from right here in our backyard. Our 16th season will abound with world premiere works from a diverse bevy of international composers including a series of programs devoted to the music of one of Cleveland’s own, the incomparable Greg D’Alessio. As in past years, No Exit will once again join forces with the Minnesota-based new music ensemble Zeitgeist to present this season’s installment of Here and There, a collaborative effort that always brings something special to the stage. The ensemble will also host a slew of not-to-be-missed performances from renowned artists through our “No Exit Presents” series: The Meridian Arts Ensemble, trombonist John Faieta, pianist Geoffrey Burleson and the drum set/saxophone duo, Patchwork. No Exit’s 2024-25 season will culminate with a European tour which will see the group perform works that were premiered for our audiences in Cleveland. 
Lauded for providing “a once-in-a-lifetime experience for adventurous concertgoers,” Zeitgeist is a new music chamber ensemble comprised of two percussion, piano and woodwinds. One of the longest established new music groups in the country, Zeitgeist commissions and presents a wide variety of new music for audiences in Minnesota and throughout the nation. Always eager to explore new artistic frontiers, Zeitgeist collaborates with sound artists of all types to create imaginative new work that challenges the boundaries of traditional chamber music. More
Jin Hi Kim, innovative komungo virtuoso, Guggenheim Fellow composer, and United States Artist Fellow, has performed as a soloist in her own compositions at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Smithsonian Freer Gallery of Art, Asia Society, Metropolitan Museum of Art and around the world. She is a pioneer for introducing komungo (geomungo) into the American contemporary music scene and for extensive solo performances on the world’s only electric komungo with live interactive computer programs in her large-scale multimedia performance pieces such as GHOST KOMUNGOBOT, DIGITAL BUDDHA, and TOUCHING THE MOONS. Kim’s ‘Living Tones’ compositions have been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, Festival Nieuwe Muziek for Xenakis Ensemble, Zeitgeist, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Meet The Composer, National Endowment for the Arts and others. She received the New England Foundation for the Arts' Rebecca Blunk Fund Award to create A Ritual for Covid-19 in memory of the deceased worldwide during the pandemic.
The word NORI means fun play in Korean and originated in the traditional “farmer’s percussion band”‚ in the 3rd century. This music was performed when country folks celebrated the lunar calendar festival and performed at the village Shamanistic ritual. During the Shaman ritual (kut), the farmer’s percussion group entertained the crowds with a parade and dance with spinning hats while they were playing the band at outdoor events. In contemporary times, this tradition has evolved by using the word samulnori. In 1978, four virtuoso Korean percussionists created a small ensemble for janggu (hour glass shaped drum), buk (barrel drum), jing (gong) and kwenggari (small gong), and they started to perform this music in a sitting position on the floor for indoor concert events. Thus moving it from the original outdoors to the formal concert stage performed by professionals. Traditionally the music is for exorcism with the aesthetic of duality of tension and release between tempo; and contrasting timbres of yin and yang between skin and metal instruments of the ensemble. The series of rhythmic cycles evolve with continuous variations that have the alternative goal to create both swing and mesmerizing energy throughout the piece.
NORI II realizes the same aesthetic for Western instruments. In this piece the time sense is different. The rhythmic cycles reflect ever-repeating cycles of our life. They eventually move towards independent rhythmic cycles, reflecting the behavior of energy inside empty space forcing planets and stars further away from each other and into space. 
JOHN CAGE was born on September 5, 1912 in Los Angeles, California and died in New York City on August 12, 1992. He studied liberal arts at Pomona College. Among his composition teachers were Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg. Cage was elected to the American National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and received innumerable awards and honors. He was commissioned by a great many of the most important performing organizations throughout the world, and maintained a very active schedule. It would be extremely difficult to calculate, let alone critically evaluate, the stimulating effect and ramifications that Cage's work has had on music and art, for it is clear that the musical developments of our time cannot be understood without taking into account his music and ideas. His invention of the prepared piano and his work with percussion instruments led him to imagine and explore many unique and fascinating ways of structuring the temporal dimension of music. He is universally recognized as the initiator and leading figure in the field of indeterminate composition by means of chance operations.
Cage’s composition, RYOANJI, is named after a rock garden in Kyoto, Japan which consists of a collection of 15 rocks placed in a landscape of raked, white sand. Cage’s work is a solo for one or more winds plus a percussion accompaniment. The solo is organized into a series of “songs” created on 2 pages, each of which contains 2 rectangular systems. In each rectangle, Cage traced parts of the perimeters of the given stones. These curves are to be played as glissandi within the given pitch ranges. The percussion part is a single complex of 2 unspecified sounds, played in unison, wood and metal. Percussionists should play in "Korean unison", their attacks being close, but not exactly together. The soloists represent the stones of the garden, the accompaniment the raked sand.
Artistic director/composer and Cleveland native, Timothy Beyer creates music imbued with an expressive and singular voice. Tim has been active as both a composer and performer in an eclectic range of musical mediums. He has composed for a variety of concert music genres, has scored for film, dance, and has produced many works in the electronic music idiom. Much of Tim’s early acclaim came from his inventive use of narrative in his electronic compositions, and this same sensibility pervades his concert music which has been described as something “… found only in our dreams, or nightmares…” (The Washington Post).
Early in his career, Tim spent his time as a touring musician, most notably as a founding member, composer and trombonist for the group Pressure Drop. Tim’s music has been performed throughout the U.S. and Europe by a variety of soloists and ensembles. He is currently working on several recording projects including a vocal/electronic collaboration with composer Andrew Rindfleisch, a collection of his works written for the Minnesota-based ensemble Zeitgeist and a CD featuring his ‘amputate’ series of electroacoustic compositions, the first four of which were created for cellist David Russell, flutist Carlton Vickers, pianist Jenny Lin and violinist Hasse Borup. Tim also writes children’s books including a retelling of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno for ages 6+ and the history-based storybook Der sehr ungezogene Junge. His most recent effort, Bat and Squirrel, is due to be released in 2024. 
James Praznik is a composer, conductor, and pianist whose work has garnered acclaim among his peers as well as audiences. As a composer of highly expressive music, James has composed music for concerts, stage productions and commercial videogames. He has participated in the Interlochen Composer’s Institute and the Cleveland State Composer’s Recording Institute, and received honors such as the University of Akron Outstanding Composer Award on two occasions the University of Akron Outstanding Pianist Award, and the Bain Murray Award for Music.James has been a guest composer, arranger, pianist and conductor for the “Monsterpianos!” concerts in Akron, Ohio, and through the Cleveland Contemporary Players workshops he received recordings of his pieces made by some of today’s leading virtuosi. He has been commissioned by the new music ensemble “No Exit”, and NASA in conjunction with the Cleveland Ingenuity Festival. His music has been performed at E.J. Thomas Hall, Cleveland State University, The University of Akron, The Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, The Cleveland Ingenuity Festival, Brandeis University and Wellesley College. As a pianist and a proponent of other composers’ music, James has performed on The Ohio State University new music concerts, the Kentucky New Music Festival electro‐acoustic concerts, and as a member of the Akron New Music Ensemble. He is an associate director of “No Exit”, a Cleveland based new music ensemble, and is an original member of “Duo Approximate”, a group that performs live soundtracks to silent films. Recently James created sound effects for the film “Shockwaves” by media artist Kasumi.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in composition and theory from the University of Akron where he studied compostion with Daniel McCarthy and Nikola Resanovic (as well as piano under Philip Thomson) , and has recently received a master’s degree in composition at Cleveland State University where he studied with Andrew Rindfleisch and Greg D’Alessio. Currently James is a PhD candidate at Brandeis University where he studies with Eric Chasalow, David Rakowski and Yu-Hui Chang. The idea behind the Literary Interludes was for composers Timothy Beyer and James Praznik to create a series of short improvised pieces, miniatures really, that evoked some aspect of a few of the composers’ favorite novels. A framework was constructed for the interludes, sometimes very detailed and in other cases, not so much. The musicians then become part of the creation of the piece by improvising according to the parameters given. The literary works used are: Burmese Days by George Orwell, Wake Up and Go to Sleep by G Lyle, The Stranger by Albert Camus, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima.
Ten-time American Prize winner Douglas Knehans (b. 1957) has received awards from the American Music Center, the NEA, the Australia Council Performing Arts Board, Yale University, the MacDowell Colony, Opera Australia, The Cannes Film Festival, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, The National Symphony Orchestra, The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Meet the Composer, and a host of others.
His music has been praised by The Washington Post as “beautiful” and that “tells an exciting story;” by The New Yorker, saying “the sounds of nature course through the orchestral pieces … with a primitive force and melodic insistence that recall Stravinsky.”, by The Australian as “brilliantly catchy and eerily bright;” and by Fanfare Magazine as “… astonishingly visceral … and hauntingly beautiful.” A fellow of Carnegie Hall, the Victorian Council of the Arts, MacDowell Colony and Leighton Artist Colony (Banff), Knehans has been a guest of the Czech-American Summer Music Institute in Prague, Czech Republic; the New Music, New Faces Festival in Krakow, Poland; Premieres of the Season Festival in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a number of others. A noted composer of opera, vocal and choral music, Knehans' one hour operatic monodrama Backwards from Winter was premiered at the New York Opera Fest by the Center for Contemporary Opera and one month later was featured in a different production in a season of performances that led Fanfare Magazine critic Colin Clarke to claim it “An astonishingly visceral Winterreise for the 21st century,” and “This is what contemporary opera should be like.” With an exceptional orchestral craft Knehans is known for his four symphonies and twelve concerti which have been played and recorded by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, The Kyiv Philharmonic, Brno Philharmonic, Royal Scottish National Orchestra and others in Australia, Europe and the USA. His orchestral compositions have earned him numerous international recording awards and in 2023 he was inducted into the AKADEMIA Awards Hall of Fame. Knehans was named Composer of the Year 2013 by the Ohio Music Teachers Association and was a 2011 winner of the International Music Prize for Excellence in Music Composition (Athens, Greece). He has been a member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and a voting member of the Grammy Awards since 2010. Knehans’ music is available on ERM Media, Crystal Records, Move Records, New World Records, Naxos Records, and ABLAZE Records labels. His work is published by Donemus Publishers, Netherlands. Still Clouds is the continuation of a type of my music that is about stillness, beauty, reflection, perhaps even meditation. Not all of music is like this of course, but chamber music, especially for certain instruments, seems to elicit this kind of artistic response from me. The work is essentially formless and based on the repetition and free interchange and development of very simple ideas. AS these grow and interact through, they take on, for me, a mesmerizing intersectionality where one ‘flow’ meets and perhaps even overrides another. The title refers to this also—slowly moving strata of sounds gently colliding and morphing into each other and out again. Just as one sees sublime summer clouds do, Endlessly. And always. — Douglas Knehans
Luis Daniel Jiménez was born in Mexico City in 1994, started his guitar lesson when was 10 years old, and when he was 15 started to play piano and wrote his first compositions, principally for piano solo. At 18 he began to study composition at the Faculty of Music from the Autonomous University of Mexico, where he first studied with Leonardo Coral, and then with Gabriela Ortiz. From where he received his major with honors in 2023.
In 2020 he won second prize with his piece Jicarazo, in the Matices A. E. First Competition. In 2021 he received a scholarship to study with Arturo Marquez, where he composed his works Cinco Poemas for chamber orchestra, and Difrasismo for Symphonic Orchestra. In 2022 attend the Bowdoin International Music Festival in Maine, where he composed his works, Cachivaches and Árboles. And where he studied with Derek Bermel and Andreia Pinto Correia. In 2023 was part of an orchestration room, in which he worked together with the Philharmonic Orchestra of Mexico, and where he received master clases from the principal players, and Scott Yuu as well. In 2024 the Symphonic Orchestra of Mexico played his piece Difrasismo as part of an open rehearsal, with the intention of preparing a concert of young composers in 2025, which will be realized in the Palace of Fine Arts. Chiltepin is a work for septet, conformed by flute, bass clarinet, violin, viola, violonchelo, percussions, and piano. It was commissioned by the No Exit New Music Ensemble, written in 2024 and premiered during No Exit’s tour around Cleveland, Ohio, and St. Paul, Minnesota in 2025. The work is made up of three movements, each structured differently with the propose of creating contrast between them, the first and third being the most spicy, and the second a small kind of reflection.
Chiltepin is characterized by having rhythm as a fundamental part of its structure, therefore the percussions are also fundamental, through the piece percussions are presenting different aspects of latin percussions, especially from salsa, cumbia, son cubano, among other. Some of those aspects are the conga played with hand making different colors, and the snare played as if it were “Cascara” in Pailas. |
