The Blue in the Distance
Zeitgeist and composer Scott L. Miller team up once again to present The Blue in the Distance — an immersive concert experience featuring music and film that celebrates natural landscape imagery in Minnesota and all points north.
The program includes three works by Minnesota artists. North by Mary Ellen Childs is inspired by the composer’s travels in the Arctic and features stark and awesome imagery from above the Arctic circle and our own northern Minnesota as well as evocative music recorded by Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist percussionist Heather Barringer will perform several movements from Asuka Kakitani’s sonorous and colorful Twelve Months in Minnesota accompanied by new film imagery by filmmaker Caitlin Hammel. Scott L. Miller’s The Blue in the Distance completes the trio, with a gorgeous chamber work for Zeitgeist plus singer Tracey Englemann featuring the poetry of Joyce Sutphen and original film by Miller of Quarry Park Reserve in Waite Park, MN. Zeitgeist will be appearing in St. Cloud as featured ensemble-in-residence for the MN Made Festival. Their performance in St. Cloud is designed for performance in the St. Cloud State University planetarium with immersive films projected on the dome with each piece. The performance in Red Wing will take place at the Anderson Center barn with musicians throughout the space. The Blue in the Distance is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Zeitgeist’s residency in St. Cloud is funded through the gracious support of the Steve Fuller Music Performance Residency Fund. About the WORKS
THE BLUE IN THE DISTANCE “I wanted to create a new VR concert work based on an inspiring natural Minnesota location for my longtime friends and collaborators in the ensemble Zeitgeist to perform. I chose the Quarry Park Reserve in Waite Park, MN as the location and began filming there in April 2018, in the days following the blizzard that month. It felt important to add a narrative element to the film and I set about looking for poetry that resonated with the project, ideally by a Minnesotan and about Central Minnesota. I came across the work of Minnesota Poet Laureate Joyce Sutphen. Joyce grew up in St. Joseph, not far from Quarry Park (it was just a closed granite quarry then), and her work frequently evokes imagery and aspects of life in Minnesota that I find compelling. Her poem The Blue in the Distance perfectly captures the natural setting of Quarry Park and provided a structure for me to organize the film and music around. Our premiere performances were cut short by the COVID pandemic and like so many artists and organizations, we moved on to new projects with the idea of returning to the shelved ones from 2020. In discussing how to revive this work, we thought it would be very interesting to present it in planetariums around Minnesota rather than with two dozen VR headsets and all the related paraphernalia. I think this presentation format will be very successful and reach a wide audience in such an unusual venue for new music.” — Scott L. Miller
The Blue in the Distance creation supported in part by the American Composers Forum through the 2018 McKnight Composer Fellowship Program. Scott L. Miller is a 2018 McKnight Composition Fellow. Joyce Sutphen is Minnesota’s Poet Laureate emeritus (2011 - 2021) 
Based on the stark winter environment of the Arctic, NORTH combines recorded music performed by Zeitgeist and projected imagery of northern snowscapes to create an immersive environment in which to consider our northernmost lands and their connection to all of us wherever we live. NORTH is inspired by Mary Ellen Childs’s experience participating in the Arctic Circle Expedition, a residency project that places artists onboard an Arctic-bound scientific vessel. Departing from the international territory of Svalbard, 10 degrees from the North Pole, Childs lived aboard a Tall Ship, sailing and making landfall daily to experience the terrain and collect recordings and imagery.
Childs came away with profound artistic impressions of the spare, often subtle, and occasionally violent sounds of the Arctic, the overwhelming breadth of the landscape and seascapes, and the predominant Arctic hues: shades of white, pink, blue. Svalbard, a scientific outpost, is so remote it has never supported indigenous people, and has few occupants today. It is place where nature rules and demands the upper hand. Yet, even in this land where people are not, human impact is evident. Plastic and trash from far away populations is abundant on the shoreline, and receding glaciers and ice floes reflect human-caused climate change. For Childs, this experience underscores the way in which the air we breathe, the water we use, and the earth we tread is shared by all on the planet. 
TWELVE MONTHS IN MINNESOTA
When I moved to Northfield from Brooklyn, NY, in 2016, I became captivated by Minnesota’s vibrant nature. Summer is shockingly colorful and brilliant, and winter is unimaginably cold, but its beauty is breathtaking. The winter night is so dark I cannot see my feet as I walk, but when I look up, I can see many stars. The sunrise and sunset are magical, and clouds are often in fascinating shapes, which I could watch for hours. This piece contains 12 movements inspired by nature in Minnesota. I tried to capture the spirit and feel of particular moments from each month of the year. This performance features four movements from the twelve-movement work with each movement accompanied by imagery created by filmmaker Caitlin Hammel. Those movements are January, February, July, and September and are performed live by Heather Barringer. About the Artists
Scott L. Miller is an American composer and improviser. His music is characterized by collaborative approaches to composition and the use of electronics, exploring performer/
computer improvisation. Inspired by the inner-workings of sound in the natural and mechanical worlds, his music is the product of hands-on experimentation and collaboration with musicians and performers from across the spectrum of styles. Miller’s recent work explores virtual and augmented reality to immerse the audience, geolocate sound in parks and farms, and animate graphic scores. He is a three time McKnight Composer Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, and Past-President of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the U.S. His music is available on New Focus Recordings, Panoramic, ein klang, Innova, and others, and is published by American Composers Edition. Miller is a Professor of Music at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota, and he is Director of SEAMUS Records. Miller has collaborated with Zeitgeist as a composer, performer, and producer of their recordings since 2003. He created his first VR concert work, Raba, with Tallinn-based Ensemble U:, VR film-maker Rein Zobel, and the SCSU Visualization and Simulation Lab in 2017. Raba was created in response to a visit to the Marimetsa Raba, an enormous bog in Estonia. 
With a voice the Boston Globe called “extraordinary in range, tonal quality, musicianship and dramatic effect,” soprano Tracey Engleman has gained a reputation for excellence in opera, recital and concert. Most recently, Ms. Engleman was awarded a 2016 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Musicians. Recent operatic roles include Papagena in The Magic Flute, Ofglen in The Handmaid’s Tale, the Page in Rigoletto and the Girl in the Bed in Casanova’s Homecoming with the Minnesota Opera, Julie in The New Moon with Music by the Lake, Kathy in The Student Prince with Skylark Opera, the School Teacher in Ainadamar with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Adina in L’Elisir d’amore and Norina in Don Pasquale with the Rochester Aria Group, and Elivira in I puritani with Minnesota Concert Opera. In 2010, Ms. Engleman premiered the role of Isabella Smith in The Ladysmith Story, a contemporary opera by Minnesota composer Christopher Gable.
Particularly gifted as a performer of contemporary music, Ms. Engleman has performed Two Poems from the Sung Dynasty with conductor and composer Bright Sheng with the Chicago Chamber Musicians and at the Festival of Contemporary Music at the Tanglewood Music Center. Ms. Engleman premiered Minnesota composer Libby Larsen’s new orchestral version of Sonnets from the Portuguese with the La Crosse Symphony Orchestra and recently premiered songs from the CD Tipping Point by composer Scott Miller with the internationally known contemporary ensemble, Zeitgeist. Upcoming performances include Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire with the St. Olaf Chamber Players. 
Caitlin Hammel is a filmmaker in the Twin Cities. Her work has been shown at screenings and film festivals nationally and internationally. She has worked in documentary, narrative, and projection, but always with the purpose and passion to find the story of the people involved and use film to illuminate that journey. She is so proud to be a company member of Nimbus Theatre and to have performed on the Nimbus stage. She is also an enthusiastic educator at the Bakken Museum.
Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm near St. Joseph, Minnesota, and currently lives in Chaska. She has degrees from the University of Minnesota, including a Ph.D. in Renaissance Drama. Her first book, Straight Out of View, won the Barnard New Women's Poets Prize (Beacon Press, 1995, republished by Holy Cow! Press in 2001). Coming Back to the Body (Holy Cow! Press, 2000) was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and Naming the Stars (Holy Cow! Press, 2004) won the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. In 2005, Red Dragonfly Press published Fourteen Sonnets in a letterpress edition, and in 2006 Sutphen co-edited the award-winning anthology To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present (New Rivers Press). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Minnesota Monthly, Water-Stone, and many other journals, and she has had work featured in Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry, and on The Writer's Almanac. She has also been a guest on A Prairie Home Companion, hosted by Garrison Keillor. In 2011 she was named the second Minnesota Poet Laureate by Governor Mark Dayton, following the tenure of Robert Bly.
Mary Ellen Childs is a composer interested in all the senses: she is known for works that speak not only to the ears, but to the eyes, and even the nose. She is known for creating both rhythmic, exuberant instrumental music and kinetic compositions that integrate theater, dance and music in unexpected ways. She writes for a variety of ensembles, including vocal ensembles, solo accordion, string quartets, and chamber groups of every ilk. She has received grants and commissions from Opera America, the Kronos Quartet, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Dale Warland Singers, The Kitchen, Walker Art Center, Other Minds, Meet The Composer’s commissioning programs, MAP Fund, and Creative Capital. In 2011 she was named a United States Artist Fellow, awarded by nomination only to “America's “most innovative and influential artists in their fields.”
Her work is influenced by place, sensory experience, architecture, and passages of time. She is committed to researching her projects wherever they may take her. When writing a dance piece about Lake Superior, she rented a cabin just feet from the shore of the great lake, watching the many moods of the water. To research an opera about the human urge to fly, she spent an adventurous week at a residency in Ottawa Canada, flying: piloting a small plane, hang gliding, and more. To prepare for musical works that incorporate scent, she traveled to France to visit a perfume archive and meet with a master perfumer, and she has studied perfume-making at the Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles and at the Institute for Perfumery in Grasse, France. As a result, she has recently been creating a series of works that combine sound and scent, under the title Ear + Nose. She creates distinctive sound worlds, often for specific architecture or environments. Stone Steel Wood Glass Light, commissioned for the Chicago Architectural Biennial, drew inspiration from the Farnsworth House, a glass house designed by Mies van der Rohe, where it was premiered to a series of small audience. Other full-length works include Dream House for string quartet (written for ETHEL) based on destruction and construction, and was accompanied by multi-image video of construction sites; and Wreck was created for dance (Black Label Movement Company), for which she won a 2008 Sage Award. Childs has held artist residencies at the Bellagio Center in Italy, Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), Yaddo, Djerassi Foundation, Millay Colony, Ucross (Alpert residency), Emily Harvey Foundation (Venice, Italy), and the Arctic Circle Expedition in Svalbard. Currently, she is will be in residence for two months at Nawat Fes in Morocco, continuing her research in scent and sound in preparation for her new work, DESERT, a partner piece to NORTH. Photo credit: Laura Blanchi 
“A musical impressionist and supreme colorist” (Hot House Magazine) aptly characterizes the Japanese-born composer Asuka Kakitani. Her deep love for nature and animals inspires Kakitani to transform her imagination into epic musical stories that DownBeat Magazine described as brimming with “sumptuous positivity and organic flow.”
She is the founder of the 18-piece ensemble the Asuka Kakitani Jazz Orchestra, and their first recording Bloom has been featured on the international radio program PRI’s The World, acknowledged as one of the best debut albums of the year by DownBeat Magazine Critics’ Poll and NPR Music Jazz Critics’ Poll, and All About Jazz called it “absolutely superb.” After she relocated to Minnesota from Brooklyn, NY in 2016, she co-founded the Twin Cities Jazz Composers’ Workshop, which aims to foster creative and forward-looking composition for the modern jazz orchestra in the Twin Cities area. Kakitani also co-founded and conducts Inatnas Orchestra with her husband, composer/trombonist JC Sanford, that features both of their music and some of the best jazz musicians in the twin cities area. Kakitani has been the recipient of grants and awards including the BMI Charlie Parker Jazz Composition Prize, the Manny Albam Commission, the Jerome Fund for New Music from the American Composers Forum, Brooklyn Arts Council, two Composer Assistance Grants from the American Music Center, and recently was awarded a 2019 McKnight Composer Fellowship. Photo credit: Bryan Murphy |
