Sounding Ground Showcase
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March 22 11 a.m.
The Anderson Center 163 Tower View Drive; Red Wing, MN 55066 $15 |
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Join Zeitgeist and Sounding Ground artists Sarah M Greer, May Klug, Leyna Marika Papach, and JC Sanford for a performance of the new works they have developed through Sounding Ground. New works will include “PERSON/a requiem’ by Papach, Brennschluss by Klug, Precipice: Breaths for Diving by Greer, and Underwater Cousins by Sanford.
The SOUNDING GROUND composer residency program provides commissioning, development, and production support for Minnesota composers in the early stages of their careers. SOUNDING GROUND awardees work closely with Zeitgeist over an extended period on the development and production of a significant new work created for Zeitgeist.
The SOUNDING GROUND composer residency program provides commissioning, development, and production support for Minnesota composers in the early stages of their careers. SOUNDING GROUND awardees work closely with Zeitgeist over an extended period on the development and production of a significant new work created for Zeitgeist.
Leyna Marika Papach is a composer, interdisciplinary artist and violinist from Japan and the United States. With music being her central lens, she has created a body of work that spans across theater, dance, poetry and the visual arts. Her many works have been presented in Europe, Japan, West Africa, US, and her projects and creative explorations have been supported by programs such as the MAP Fund, NEA, HERE Arts Center, Minnesota Opera, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and ACF and others. In 2024, she received the McKnight Composer Fellowship. As a collaborator and performer, she has worked with inspiring artists across a wide range of disciplines-J.G.Thirlwell (composer), Aya Ogawa (playwright), Taylor Mac (artist), Nels Cline (guitarist), Tapan Kanti Baidya(Hindustani vocalist), Will Alexander, (poetry), Chikako Bando (butoh dance) amongst others, and continues to be inspired to make interdisciplinary work. Leyna studied violin at the Prague Academy of Music and received an MA in Theater-Dance studies form DAS Theater (Amsterdam), and an MFA in sound/music/interdisciplinary studies from Bard College.
"We will be performing excerpts from a work-in-progress chamber opera called “PERSON/a requiem’. The requiem is a sort of an umbrella that contains vignettes from everyday life where a situation may convey an emotional nuance that is in a grey area, in relation to our mysterious existence as human beings.
The music and theme has influence from Japan (as I grew up there), and its cultural sensibility of being comfortable in the ‘in-between', where there is not necessarily a clear solution to a question.
The final piece will be for choir, four singers and a chamber ensemble, but these excerpts were developed and composed for Zeitgeist’s unique ensemble through the Sounding Ground residency, joined by violin and voice." — Leyna Marika Papach
"We will be performing excerpts from a work-in-progress chamber opera called “PERSON/a requiem’. The requiem is a sort of an umbrella that contains vignettes from everyday life where a situation may convey an emotional nuance that is in a grey area, in relation to our mysterious existence as human beings.
The music and theme has influence from Japan (as I grew up there), and its cultural sensibility of being comfortable in the ‘in-between', where there is not necessarily a clear solution to a question.
The final piece will be for choir, four singers and a chamber ensemble, but these excerpts were developed and composed for Zeitgeist’s unique ensemble through the Sounding Ground residency, joined by violin and voice." — Leyna Marika Papach
Sarah M. Greer is a singing, improvising, and performing artist who works at the intersection of song, sound and story. She has performed in numerous Twin Cities venues, at the Twin Cities and Madison, WI Jazz Festivals, for NPR’s Talking Volumes with Give Get Sistet, opened for Take 6 (also with Give Get Sistet), and has invented music on regional and national stages.
As a recording artist and composer, Sarah released their original and highly improvised debut album What the Music Says Do in 2018 and will release a live album of their improvised work Between: A Journey Through the Middle (2025) this year. Additionally, they are developing an improvised composition sourced from the sounds we make as we express sorrow entitled Giving Voice to Grief (MRAC 2023-24).
Sarah was a 2024 Naked Stages Fellow and has received awards to create new work. Sarah holds a Bachelor of Special Studies with a focus in music and a vocal performance degree. She is passionate, nearly evangelical, about the power of our voices to change our world.
Sarah states the following about her work, Precipice: Breaths for Diving.
"The 2020s marked my entrance into a new, expanding and evolving relationship with grief. As a resident of South Minneapolis, I live(d) in the city that witnessed (and mourns) the murder of George Floyd and its aftermath as we navigated the early months of the pandemic, including a time when singers didn’t have any idea when we might sing together again. Now in 2025, we are live-streaming genocides in many countries around the world and in the midst of a chaotic and calamitous start to the current president’s term.
I feel more and more the weight of community grief caused by the traumas and tragedies occurring to others in my city, country and around the world, while also struggling to hold the guilt of arriving late to knowledge and experiences some in my communities have been carrying for a long, long time.
In my ongoing attempts to find ways to hold and digest and heal these injuries, I started singing and improvising, working within the artistic disciplines in which I am practiced. In following my improviser’s intuition, I find my artistry expanding into new areas, represented by the graphic score I created for “Precipice: Breaths for Diving.”
A singer friend likened spending time in/with grief to the diving that whales (our mammal brethren) do. Like us, whales also need to breathe air into lungs so they have evolved to spend time long periods diving for their survival. During these dives, which may last up to an hour, they exist on a single breath.
I have come to appreciate the idea that we can (and must) “dive” into grief to discover and retrieve the things that only exist there, to “find what we can/need.” This improvised work is born from the premise that we are at the beginning of such a dive and are taking the breath that will sustain us through and to the next place."
As a recording artist and composer, Sarah released their original and highly improvised debut album What the Music Says Do in 2018 and will release a live album of their improvised work Between: A Journey Through the Middle (2025) this year. Additionally, they are developing an improvised composition sourced from the sounds we make as we express sorrow entitled Giving Voice to Grief (MRAC 2023-24).
Sarah was a 2024 Naked Stages Fellow and has received awards to create new work. Sarah holds a Bachelor of Special Studies with a focus in music and a vocal performance degree. She is passionate, nearly evangelical, about the power of our voices to change our world.
Sarah states the following about her work, Precipice: Breaths for Diving.
"The 2020s marked my entrance into a new, expanding and evolving relationship with grief. As a resident of South Minneapolis, I live(d) in the city that witnessed (and mourns) the murder of George Floyd and its aftermath as we navigated the early months of the pandemic, including a time when singers didn’t have any idea when we might sing together again. Now in 2025, we are live-streaming genocides in many countries around the world and in the midst of a chaotic and calamitous start to the current president’s term.
I feel more and more the weight of community grief caused by the traumas and tragedies occurring to others in my city, country and around the world, while also struggling to hold the guilt of arriving late to knowledge and experiences some in my communities have been carrying for a long, long time.
In my ongoing attempts to find ways to hold and digest and heal these injuries, I started singing and improvising, working within the artistic disciplines in which I am practiced. In following my improviser’s intuition, I find my artistry expanding into new areas, represented by the graphic score I created for “Precipice: Breaths for Diving.”
A singer friend likened spending time in/with grief to the diving that whales (our mammal brethren) do. Like us, whales also need to breathe air into lungs so they have evolved to spend time long periods diving for their survival. During these dives, which may last up to an hour, they exist on a single breath.
I have come to appreciate the idea that we can (and must) “dive” into grief to discover and retrieve the things that only exist there, to “find what we can/need.” This improvised work is born from the premise that we are at the beginning of such a dive and are taking the breath that will sustain us through and to the next place."
May Klug is an experimental electronic composer/performer whose deep relationships with pieces of audio equipment and electronic instruments are a bridge through which she explores the networks of technological development, industry, and modern social life. Her performances blend electroacoustic experimentalism with the theater of pop, queer performance art, and high-femme fashion.
May’s primary instrument, and electronic collaborator, is the Casio CZ-101 synthesizer. By allowing the synth’s digital memory to decay, she generates sounds that capture the natural process of memory loss in a volatile RAM circuit with no electricity.
Klug's piece, Brennschluss, is written for Marimba, Vibraphone, Clarinet, and two Casio CZ101 Synthesizers.
The synthesizers in this piece produce an extremely low oscillation that is heard as a repeating click. This oscillation slowly increases in frequency as the key is held down, and falls in pitch when the key is released - heard as the acceleration and deceleration of the click. If these oscillator’s frequencies were graphed, they would form parabolic arcs, where the vertex is the moment that the key is released and the rate of the click begins to fall back down. Each percussion player hears the signal of one synthesizer in their headphones, and follows the rate of that click as they would a metronome. The frequency of the click increases rapidly, to the point that it approaches, and may cross, the barrier between rhythm and pitch.
Brennschluss is a loan word from German rocket science, coined in the program that developed the V2 rockets used in the atrocious bombing of Britain during World War 2. It describes the moment at which a rocket ceases to burn fuel - the height of its parabolic arc, and beginning of its descent.
From Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon:
“Their electric clocks run fast, even Big Ben will be fast now until the new spring’s run in, all fast, and no one else seems to understand or to care. The War needs electricity. It’s a lively game, Electric Monopoly, among the power companies, the Central Electricity Board, and other War agencies, to keep Grid Time synchronized with Greenwich Mean Time. In the night, the deepest concrete walls of night, dynamos whose locations are classified spin faster, and so, responding, the clock-hands next to all the old, sleepless eyes-- gathering in their minutes whining, pitching higher toward the vertigo of a siren. It is the Night’s Mad Carnival. There is merriment under the shadows of the minute-hands. Hysteria in the pale faces between the numerals. The power companies speak of loads, war-drains so vast the clocks will slow again unless this nighttime march is stolen, but the loads expected daily do not occur, and the Grid runs inching ever faster, and the old faces turn to the clock faces, thinking plot, and the numbers go whirling toward the Nativity, a violence, a nova of heart that will turn us all, change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are. But over the sea the fog tonight still is quietly scalloped pearl. Up in the city the arc-lamps crackle, furious, in smothered blaze up the centerlines of the streets, too ice-colored for candles, too chill-dropleted for holocaust…”
May’s primary instrument, and electronic collaborator, is the Casio CZ-101 synthesizer. By allowing the synth’s digital memory to decay, she generates sounds that capture the natural process of memory loss in a volatile RAM circuit with no electricity.
Klug's piece, Brennschluss, is written for Marimba, Vibraphone, Clarinet, and two Casio CZ101 Synthesizers.
The synthesizers in this piece produce an extremely low oscillation that is heard as a repeating click. This oscillation slowly increases in frequency as the key is held down, and falls in pitch when the key is released - heard as the acceleration and deceleration of the click. If these oscillator’s frequencies were graphed, they would form parabolic arcs, where the vertex is the moment that the key is released and the rate of the click begins to fall back down. Each percussion player hears the signal of one synthesizer in their headphones, and follows the rate of that click as they would a metronome. The frequency of the click increases rapidly, to the point that it approaches, and may cross, the barrier between rhythm and pitch.
Brennschluss is a loan word from German rocket science, coined in the program that developed the V2 rockets used in the atrocious bombing of Britain during World War 2. It describes the moment at which a rocket ceases to burn fuel - the height of its parabolic arc, and beginning of its descent.
From Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon:
“Their electric clocks run fast, even Big Ben will be fast now until the new spring’s run in, all fast, and no one else seems to understand or to care. The War needs electricity. It’s a lively game, Electric Monopoly, among the power companies, the Central Electricity Board, and other War agencies, to keep Grid Time synchronized with Greenwich Mean Time. In the night, the deepest concrete walls of night, dynamos whose locations are classified spin faster, and so, responding, the clock-hands next to all the old, sleepless eyes-- gathering in their minutes whining, pitching higher toward the vertigo of a siren. It is the Night’s Mad Carnival. There is merriment under the shadows of the minute-hands. Hysteria in the pale faces between the numerals. The power companies speak of loads, war-drains so vast the clocks will slow again unless this nighttime march is stolen, but the loads expected daily do not occur, and the Grid runs inching ever faster, and the old faces turn to the clock faces, thinking plot, and the numbers go whirling toward the Nativity, a violence, a nova of heart that will turn us all, change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are. But over the sea the fog tonight still is quietly scalloped pearl. Up in the city the arc-lamps crackle, furious, in smothered blaze up the centerlines of the streets, too ice-colored for candles, too chill-dropleted for holocaust…”
JC Sanford is a wide-ranging musician, deeply rooted in the traditions of Jazz and Classical music, yet constantly pushing at their boundaries. A protégé of legendary composer and trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, he has appeared on over 30 recordings as a trombonist, conductor, composer, and producer, including his 2014 CD with the JC Sanford Orchestra entitled Views from the Inside, which yielded international acclaim and was awarded the coveted 2014 Aaron Copland Fund Recording Grant. His original compositions and arrangements have been performed by such diverse artists as John Abercrombie, Dave Liebman, Danilo Perez, Gretchen Parlato, the Swedish Wind Ensemble, Japanese koto-player Yumi Kurosawa, British singer-songwriter Joy Askew, and Grammy-nominated classical pianist Andrew Russo. JC also conducts the thrice-Grammy-nominated John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, and has conducted the Alice Coltrane Orchestra, the North German Radio Jazz Big Band (NDR), the Alan Ferber Nonet with Strings, and the JazzMN Orchestra. Since returning to his home state of MN from New York City in 2016, he has received a 2018 McKnight Composer Fellowship, several grants from the MN State Arts Board to record his compositions and arrangements, and co-founded the Twin Cities Jazz Composers’ Workshop with wife and fellow composer Asuka Kakitani. JC joins the Sounding Ground Cohort as advisory composer.
Underwater Cousins is a multi-movement piece inspired by the book What a Fish Knows by Jonathan Balcombe. Being an animal lover most of my life, I have always been interested how fish were more complicated beings than they were generally represented and wondered why they seemed to be classified so differently from those animals who live on land or have fur. Balcombe’s book outlined so many different aspects of fishes’ complex life, understanding, and relationships that were fascinating and even astounding to me at times, which inspired me to investigate deeper into examples of how fish species and individuals demonstrate the things they know, perceive, and feel.
Throughout this work, we visit various fishes in displays of their personal and often surprising experiences, and how we see each fish is not part of a bulk commodity known as “fish,” but as unique individual fishes with their own personalities and desires. This includes the African tigerfish, whose stunning math computations allow them to hunt well outside their usual environs; the grouper and moray eel, who transcend species differences and team up to stalk prey with more effective results for both; the frillfin goby, who, while smashing the laughable myth of fish short-term memory, manages to escape danger through brain power we humans would be jealous of. And the white-spotted pufferfish, whose courtship results in artwork worthy of any museum above water. The piece culminates with a vision of a world where human- and fishkind can coexist with kindness, respect, and empathy.
Underwater Cousins is a multi-movement piece inspired by the book What a Fish Knows by Jonathan Balcombe. Being an animal lover most of my life, I have always been interested how fish were more complicated beings than they were generally represented and wondered why they seemed to be classified so differently from those animals who live on land or have fur. Balcombe’s book outlined so many different aspects of fishes’ complex life, understanding, and relationships that were fascinating and even astounding to me at times, which inspired me to investigate deeper into examples of how fish species and individuals demonstrate the things they know, perceive, and feel.
Throughout this work, we visit various fishes in displays of their personal and often surprising experiences, and how we see each fish is not part of a bulk commodity known as “fish,” but as unique individual fishes with their own personalities and desires. This includes the African tigerfish, whose stunning math computations allow them to hunt well outside their usual environs; the grouper and moray eel, who transcend species differences and team up to stalk prey with more effective results for both; the frillfin goby, who, while smashing the laughable myth of fish short-term memory, manages to escape danger through brain power we humans would be jealous of. And the white-spotted pufferfish, whose courtship results in artwork worthy of any museum above water. The piece culminates with a vision of a world where human- and fishkind can coexist with kindness, respect, and empathy.
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SOUNDING GROUND is made possible by the Jerome Foundation.
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