What we keep
|
April 15 & 17 7:30 p.m Nautilus Music-Theater
308 E Prince Street, #190 Saint Paul, MN 55101 April 19 2:00 p.m. The Anderson Center 163 Tower View Drive, Red Wing, MN 55066 |
|
Change is upon us, sometimes subtle and sometimes cataclysmic. It's being visited upon our cities, small villages, and farms. It's affecting the way we work, travel, and communicate. It seems to rattle every system we've created.
With every change before us, we have the opportunity to preserve and affirm what we determine dear, necessary, and valuable…or cast away and make anew things and thinking that are no longer so. Zeitgeist's spring concert presents works that enter into that conversation. Pamela Z's work, Closed Loop, considers our rural places, and the fragility and value of our soil and food systems. Füsun Köksal's Shiftings for Bass Clarinet and Percussion centers transition and flux. Mark Applebaum's work, column facing on 3 behind lintel, addresses the choices made in keeping our urban landscape vital. Do we champion the choices of the past or embrace the aesthetics of the future? Historical architecture preservationist Bethany Gladhill will join us for St. Paul performances to talk about current and past building preservationist activities in St. Paul. About the composers
PAMELA Z is a composer/performer and media artist working primarily with voice, live electronics, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live looping, she processes her voice to create complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and wireless MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures.
She has been commissioned to compose scores for dance, theatre, film, and chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, the Living Earth Show, Eighth Blackbird, the Bang on a Can All Stars, Julia Bullock with SF Symphony, and the LA Philharmonic New Music Group. Her interdisciplinary performances have been presented at venues including The Kitchen (NY), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), REDCAT (LA), and MCA (Chicago), and her installations have been presented at such exhibition spaces as MoMA (NY), the Whitney (NY), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), and the Krannert (IL). Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She has performed in numerous festivals including Bang on a Can (NY), Interlink (Japan), Other Minds (San Francisco), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Dak’Art (Sénégal) and Pina Bausch Tanztheater Festival (Wuppertal). She’s a recipient of numerous awards including the Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MIT McDermott Award, United States Artists, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Guggenheim, Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Herb Alpert Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder. www.pamelaz.com 
FÜSUN KÖKSAL
Recently awarded the Mario Merz Prize (Italy) in music composition of 2022, Köksal holds numerous international awards and fellowships among others Henri Dutilleux Composition Prize (France), ASCAP plus awards(USA), Civitella Ranieri Music Fellowship (Italy-USA), MacDowell Colony Fellowship (USA). Köksal was awarded the Fulbright Academic Research Fellowship and was Visiting Scholar at The University of Chicago (from January 1 to September 30) in 2024. Köksal’s works have recently been programmed in various contemporary music festivals such as Berliner Festspiele MaerzMusik (Germany), Schleswig Holstein Music Festival (Germany), Warsaw Autumn Festival (Poland), Via Stellae Festival (Spain), Fertile Crescent (USA), Mise-En Music Festival (USA), Timsonia (Romania), KNM Contemporaries (Germany), Acht Brucken Festival(Germany), Forum Neue Musik (Germany), NOW! Festival (Germany), Barca Solare (Italy) among others. The prominent ensembles and performers who have featured her music include Duo Gross/Schouten, Derek Bermel, Agata Igras, Richard Haynes, Horia Dumitrache, Nina Janssen Deinzer, Peyee Chen, Cem Önertürk, Ensemble E-Mex, Penderecki String Quartet, Ensemble Calliopée, Ensemble U, Hezarfen Ensemble, Da Capo Chamber Players, Pacifica Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Bilkent Symphony Orchestra, Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, Turin Philharmonic Orchestra, Turkish Youth Symphony Orchestra, and Vertix Sonore. Köksal is an active researcher on contemporary music. Her research interests include the mutualistic relationships between the perceptible stuctures and expression in contemporary music. Köksal presented in various internationally known conferences such as Ligeti Symposium 2017, Helsinki, (EuroMAC-10), 15th The International Congress on Musical Signification Barcelona, International Conference on Music Semiotics in Memory of Raymond Monelle, The University of Edinburgh. Her recent article ‘Repetitive Models in the Music 21st Century: Temporality and Expression’ is going to be published by‘Tempo’ Journal (Cambridge University Press) in January 2025. Füsun Köksal holds a Ph.D in Music from The University of Chicago, Master degrees in Music Composition and Music Theory from Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln. She received her BA from Bikent University. After serving as Visiting Assistant Professor and lecturer at Middlebury College, University of Pittsburgh, Bilkent University and The University of Chicago, she joined Yaşar University İzmir, where she teaches as Associate Professor. Since 2019 Köksal is the founder and the artistic director of İzmir New Music Days, an international music festival dedicated to contemporary music. 
MARK APPLEBAUM is the Leland & Edith Smith Professor of Composition at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in composition from the University of California at San Diego where he studied principally with Brian Ferneyhough. His solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, operatic, and electroacoustic work has been performed throughout North and South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia with notable performances at the Darmstadt Sessions.
Many of his pieces are characterized by challenges to the conventional boundaries of musical ontology: works for three conductors and no players, a concerto for florist and orchestra, pieces for instruments made of junk, notational specifications that appear on the faces of custom wristwatches, works for an invented sign language choreographed to sound, amplified Dadaist rituals, and a 72-foot long graphic score displayed in a museum and accompanied by no instructions for its interpretation. His TED Talk—about boredom—has been seen by more than three million viewers. He has received commissions from Betty Freeman, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Fromm Foundation, the Kronos Quartet, the Vienna Modern Festival, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, Chamber Music America, the Spoleto Festival, and others. The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players premiered his composition Rabbit Hole, an elaborate chamber ensemble work based on page turns. He has also engaged in many intermedia collaborations, including neural artists, film-makers, florists, animators, architects, choreographers, and laptop DJs. Applebaum is also an accomplished jazz pianist who has performed from Sumatra to Ouagadougou and who concertizes internationally with his father, Bob Applebaum, in the Applebaum Jazz Piano Duo. His music appears on the Innova, Tzadik, Capstone, Blue Leaf, SEAMUS, New Focus, Champ D’Action, and Evergreen labels. He serves on the board of Other Minds and as a trustee of Carleton College. Applebaum has held professorial positions at Carleton College and Mississippi State University. He has taught classes in Antwerp, Santiago, Singapore, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oxford, and Finland, and served as master artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. In 2000 he joined the faculty at Stanford where he directs [sic]—the Stanford Improvisation Collective, received the 2003 Walter J. Gores Award for excellence in teaching, and was named the Hazy Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. 
Bethany Gladhill first experienced preservation as a community development tool while on her neighborhood council in the mid-1990s, inspiring her to get her Master’s Degree in Historic Preservation from Goucher. Since then, she has completed context studies, surveys, design guidelines, interpretive plans, and National Register nominations throughout Minnesota, as well as a larger civil rights project incorporating all of these aspects in Waterloo, Iowa. As well as the Rochester project, she recently worked with Historic Saint Paul on their Theory of Change, and oversaw adaptive use projects for the former Victoria Theater and Brown-Jaspers Furniture Building, both in Saint Paul.
About the WORKSClosed Loop (2024)
By Pamela Z For Zeitgeist Every gardener and farmer is deeply familiar with the cycle that moves from soil to sustenance and back again. Closed Loop, Pamela Z's work for Zeitgeist, celebrates that cycle with chamber music for piano, clarinet, and a percussive arsenal including marimba, vibraphone, drums, mixing bowls, whisks, and...an immersion blender. Partnering the live musicians is an electronic score featuring samples of MN and WI chefs, farmers, and livestock. Closed Loop includes the sampled voices of Colleen Rice, Caroline Glawe, Beth Fisher, Ryan Rickman, Dean Engelmann, Abbie, Brianna Baldus, Caleb Stellmach, Molly Castle, Mathew Janczewski, Scott Mellencamp, Kirsten Mellencamp, Heather Barringer, Tristan Barringer Kenny, Maria Alvear, Sergio, Armando, Eartha Borer Bell, Rick, Rachel Wandrei, and Laura Getch. Shiftings for Bass Clarinet and Percussion (2014) By Füsun Köksala Composed in 2014, Shiftings is a one-movement work for Bass Clarinet and percussion. In Shiftings the textural units based on a rigorous rhythmic drive project a natural kind of a flux without regular repetition and are used to generate the dominating narrative mode. Thus the work reflects on the condition of flux or transition from one state to another, from one territory to the next, or from one texture to another one, creating musical space and time, in which the sequences of events, mini-events, moments, sub-stories and commentaries are crafted by semantically charged gestures, and are subsequently amalgamated. — Füsun Köksal column facing on 3 behind lintel (1997) By Mark Applebaum column facing on 3 behind lintel is scored for bass clarinet, piano, and two percussion. Although not precisely a vocal work, it incorporates (non-histrionic) text recitation reminiscent of a lecture/demonstration, and narrative rituals which suggest the theatricality of opera. column tells the story of two men, Louis Sullivan, the visionary American architect who developed the sky-scraper and fathered the Chicago School of architecture, and Richard Nickel, a gifted architectural photographer, Sullivan fanatic, maverick preservationist, and ultimately a martyr of American culture; Nickel died in 1972 in the collapse of Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange while saving its architectural ornament and photo-documenting the interior during its demolition. The characters dance together in history: Sullivan, a brilliant artist whose work was subject to decay, and Nickel, Sullivan’s discoverer, advocate, and guardian whose cultural conscience and sympathy would prove fatal. The piece consists of 16 connected movements which progress from instrumental playing, through solo, duo, and trio text recitations with instrumental accompaniment, to the final movement in which all four players recite texts. Each text is accompanied by an emblematic ritual activity: the placing of bricks, the drying of photographs, the typing of aesthetic philosophy, and the preparation of the demolition plunger. The bass clarinetist and left percussionist explicate the story of Sullivan while the pianist and right percussionist relate Nickel’s story. The former player in each pair treats the earlier and more optimistic parts of their character’s life while the latter player in each pair treats the later and more tragic biographical elements. The texts themselves progress over the span of the piece, beginning with my words and ending with Sullivan and Nickel quotations. The title is taken from Nickel’s last quotation, written words scribbled the night before his death in a note of reminder to himself regarding the pieces of ornament he planned to remove from the Stock Exchange the next day: Lintel s.s. on first stringers—table on 2 column facing on 3 behind lintel column facing on 3 behind lintel was commissioned by the Jerome Foundation for Zeitgeist who premiered the work in 1997. It is dedicated to Bernard Friedman. Many sincere thanks to Zeitgeist for their Sullivanesque artistry, their Nickelesque enthusiasm, and their own unique kindness. — Mark Applebaum 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.
|
