HOLD ... RELEASE
|
November 8, 7:30 p.m at Metronome Brewery
385 Broadway Street, Saint Paul, MN Tickets available through Metronome Brewery here November 9, 7:30 p.m. The Anderson Center 163 Tower View Drive, Red Wing, MN 55066 November 9, 7:00 p.m. Center for Performing Arts 3754 Pleasant Ave 3 Minneapolis, MN 55409 |
|
Zeitgeist opens its 2024-2025 season with Hold ... Release, a concert featuring music by Randy Bauer, Michelle Kinney, and Carei Thomas performed in venues in St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Zeitgeist's new home base of Red Wing, MN.
The past five years of pandemic and recovery have certainly been a journey. Collectively, our society has experienced incredible loss. And, we've discovered new ways of thinking and doing that will change us going forward. Throughout all, Zeitgeist has responded to the times with work addressing both loss and new potential. But, the pandemic has also called upon individuals, groups, and society to....just wait. Wait until we can take up worthy things left aside, just within view, and biding time until finally....here we go. It's time. Hold ... Release features several works that Zeitgeist developed just prior to or just at the beginning of the pandemic that we have been waiting with great anticipation to revisit and deliver to audiences throughout Minnesota and beyond. Holding Patterns by Randy Bauer was premiered in March 2020 just before the world shutdown. Tuneful and wildly intricate, this three-movement masterwork demands plentiful rehearsal, intense chamber music connection, and many performances to deliver its musical potential. Right after the premiere, our band was eagerly anticipating the prospect of deepening the work with our audiences. Now, we can. Zeitgeist began developing a body of work with composer and cellist Michelle Kinney in 2021. This fall, we will resume our collaboration with Cocoa in the Poppies, Echo and Narcissus, and Frank on the Highway. Our work together employs both composition and improvisation, space for play and revision, and we expect these works will change from their presentation in 2021 and will also lead us to future creative work. On the program as well is a work new to us by Minnesota composer Carei Thomas. Minnesota's musical community lost this vital and innovative musical force in June 2020. For decades, Zeitgeist enjoyed an invigorating and transformative musical relationship with Carei, and we are committed to serving his work in the irreverent and loving fashion he would appreciate. With this concert, Zeitgeist and Kinney will tackle a new work (we haven't picked it yet!) to challenge us and our listeners with Carei Thomas' musical sensibility. Newly created work requires multiple performances in partnership with different audiences in order to season and reach its full artistic potential. For this body of work, that seasoning opportunity was interrupted. We've been holding onto them, and are so pleased to now release. About the composers
RANDY BAUER is a composer and jazz musician based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His works have been performed across a range of cities and venues, from Austin to Zagreb, including New York, Chicago, Washington (the Kennedy Center), Boston, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Los Angeles, St. Petersburg (Russia), Uppsala (Sweden), Berlin, Paris, Weimar, and in many other smaller cities and at universities across the United States.
Premieres of his work have been given by members of the Minnesota Orchestra and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Brentano String Quartet, eighth blackbird, Nash Ensemble of London, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Synergy Vocals, New Millennium Ensemble, MATA Micro-Orchestra with Theo Bleckmann, Network for New Music, and many others. His music appears on Albany and Cedille Records. He was named a 2013-14 McKnight Foundation Fellow in Music Composition by the McKnight Foundation of Minnesota. He also received a major fellowship in 2006 from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He has been a resident artist at Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and has received many regional and national awards, including three ASCAP/Morton Gould Awards for Young Composers. He is also an accomplished jazz pianist and composer, and has received recognition from DownBeat, the Commission Project, Jazz Composers Alliance, and has won the ASCAP Young Jazz Composer's Award. Bauer holds degrees from the Peabody Conservatory of Music (BM, MM), and Princeton University (MFA, PhD). His teachers have included Ronald Caltabiano, Chen Yi, Steven Mackey, and Paul Lansky. 
MICHELLE KINNEY’s career began in Minneapolis, MN, when she returned home after receiving a BA in music from Northwestern University. During this early phase in her career, she was recognized and frequently funded as a composer & cellist, collaborating with Twin Cities choreographers (Laurie Van Wieren), filmmakers (Chris Sullivan, Chicago) and theater artists (Michael Sommers), in addition to composing for her own new music ensembles (IMP ORK, Aphid Bloodbath Consort). In 1989, she moved to New York City to pursue an MA in Performance Studies at New York University. Michelle lived in NYC for 13 years, recording and touring Europe and the US with several of her mentors; bridging musical genres and scenes, from art music (Henry Threadgill, Butch Morris, Myra Melford), to pop (Sheryl Crow, Natalie Merchant, Lou Reed); and composing for dance (Cyrus Khambatta), film (Debra Dickson) and theater (Richard Schechner).
Michelle returned to the Twin Cities in 2002, to raise her young family. In addition to again becoming very actively engaged in the community as a composer and performer, Michelle is the Musician in Residence for the Dance Program within the University of Minnesota’s Theater Arts and Dance Department. In this perfect “day job” for a musician/composer, Michelle improvises compositions in daily dance classes, with her cello played through a looping device. Each day Michelle spends hours reading bodies in motion as if they were sheet music, spontaneously creating and layering multiple cello parts, starting from a rhythmic foundation and building harmony, texture and melodic phrasing. 
Born in Pittsburgh in 1938, CAREI THOMAS spent his teens and early 20s in Chicago, where he crossed paths with one of his heroes, Sun Ra; formed a doo-wop group, and collaborated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
After serving abroad in the U.S. Army for two years, Thomas moved to Minneapolis in 1972 to study music education and therapy at the University of Minnesota. He was involved with many Twin Cities organizations, serving as music director for Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts and on the boards of West Bank School of Music and St. Paul's High School for Recording Arts; and receiving grants and fellowships from the McKnight and Bush foundations, the Minnesota State Arts Board and more. In 2011, he published "Compositions and Concepts," with sheet music and stories behind his pieces dating to 1959. Zeitgeist's selection for HOLD ... now RELEASE will be selected from this book. About the WORKSHolding Patterns (2020)
By Randy Bauer For Zeitgeist In Holding Patterns, written for Zeitgeist, different rhythmic patterns concatenate to form constantly shifting kinetic forms, not unlike the way a kaleidoscope continuously morphs colors and shapes. The first movement builds slowly through tight canons ("Battle Patterns"), before releasing into the main section, characterized by pulses in the highest register of the piano. Despite their persistence, the movement settles into a more troubled landscape of shifting colors ("Sorrowful Siege"). The ensemble engages in layers of simple, single-note ostinati in the second movement ("Patterns in a Warm Field"), while swirls of electronic sound envelop the texture. In the final movement, canonic techniques return as the energy builds to a frenzy; the last section, while more subdued, is carried once again by an interlocking pattern-based theme. Works by Michelle Kinney Cocoa in the Poppies by Michelle Kinney My soulmate Cocoa (a 13 year old golden retriever-like mutt) and I drove across the country to California where we hung out for about a month together writing this song. The poppies were in full bloom. Cocoa swam in the ocean. It was pure bliss for both of us. Frank on the Highway Frank was really lost on the highway and all he had to eat was a coffee can filled with lard and a sack of uncooked potatoes. Composed in the 1980s for a play by Chris Sullivan, it has stood the test of time. Echo and Narcissus Also composed on that California trip. Again referencing a flower (and an echo and a narcissist). The true source of this piece spun out from a captured moment of a looping phrase that I saved from accompanying a dance class. —Michelle Kinney Tickets can be securely purchased by credit card or through your PayPal account in advance, or by cash, check, or credit card at the door. Tickets purchased online will be held at the door.
|
