Chamber music concerts 2026-2027
For almost half a century, Zeitgeist has been commissioning, performing, and championing new chamber music. Along the way, we’ve built a formidable repertoire—one that continues to grow every year.
Our fall and spring chamber music concerts open that musical treasure chest, bringing adventurous works to audiences throughout Minnesota. This season’s programs feature music by Pamela Z, Jonathan Posthuma, Eve Beglarian, Buck McDaniel, and Javier Álvarez and will feature guests artists cellist Michelle Kinney and vocalist Liz Pearce. Come hear where five decades of curiosity have taken us—and where the next musical adventure might lead. VEnues and programs |
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Hastings Arts Center Coffee Concert Series
October 13, 10:30 a.m • Hastings Arts Center Blessings Academy of Arts and Music 216 4th Street East • Hastings, MN 55033 ADMISSION IS FREE • Venue information HERE PROGRAM SPARROW GRASS by Heather Barringer TEMAZCAL by Javier Álvarez I GREW UP ON A FARM by Jonathan Posthuma CLOSED LOOP by Pamela Z November 14, 1:00 p.m. • The Anderson Center 163 Tower View Drive, Red Wing, MN 55066 November 15, 4:00 p.m. • Nautilus Music-Theater 308 E Prince Street, #190 Saint Paul, MN 55101 PROGRAM TANGOCIDE by Guy Klucvesek I GREW UP ON A FARM by Jonathan Posthuma ISLAND OF THE SIRENS by Eve Beglarian TEMAZCAL by Javier Álvarez SCHERZO IN FOUR MOVEMENTS by Buck McDaniel |
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About the artists
Cellist Michelle Kinney returned home to Minneapolis after receiving a BA in music from Northwestern University. During this early phase in her career as a cellist and composer, she collaborated 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). In 1989, she moved to New York City to pursue a 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 (Seattle’s Cyrus Khambatta), film (Debra Dickson) and theater (Richard Schechner).
Michelle returned to the Twin Cities in 2002, to raise her young family. Again becoming actively engaged in her hometown community as a composer and performer, she has received recognition from the MN State Arts Board (Touring Grant), Jerome Foundation (Artist Fellowship), McKnight Foundation (Composer Fellowship), and MRAC (Next Step Grants). Current music ensembles and collaborations include with Zeitgeist, Nirmala Rajasekar’s Maithree, Dylan Hicks' Small Screens, and The Tamarack Stylites. Recent collaborations in dance and theater include with Kevin Kling, Laurie Van Wieren, & BRKFST Dance. Current music ensembles and collaborations include with Zeitgeist, Nirmala Rajasekar’s Maithree, Dylan Hicks' Small Screens, and The Tamarack Stylites. Recent collaborations in dance and theater include with Kevin Kling, Laurie Van Wieren, & BRKFST Dance. 
Vocalist LIZ PEARSE has alternately been described as a “badass”, having “a near-psychic understanding of what a composer is trying to accomplish”, and possessing “a voice made of arrows forged in a volcanic pit, transforming the didactic and mundanely intellectual into actual fire”. After a childhood spent playing every instrument she could find, Liz has focused her career on exploring the infinite possibilities of the human voice.
Liz enjoys work as a solo artist and as a chamber musician, and has performed all over North America (from Canada to Mexico and coast-to-coast in the USA) and in both Europe and the United Kingdom. Though solo performance and self-accompanying is a large part of her practice, Liz has a voracious appetite for the camaraderie of chamber music, mostly with ensembles Quince and Damselfly Trio. When she’s not performing, Liz lives and teaches in the beautiful Driftless region of Minnesota. Liz will join us for our November concerts. lizpearse.com 
Heather Barringer is a percussionist/improvisor/composer who creates work that sits at the intersection of sound art and the rural experience and addresses issues such as land ownership/accessibility/equity, rural community, food production, and sustainability. Through creating innovative arts experiences, her work brings rural and urban people together to further understanding and strengthen our food systems, environment, and democracy. Sparrow Grass is part of a body of music compositions grounded in rural culture, history, and social issues, real and imagined.
Photo by Shruthi Rajasekar 
Javier Álvarez Fuentes was a Mexican composer known for compositions that combined a variety of international musical styles and traditions and that often utilized unusual instruments and new music technologies. Many of his works combine music technology with diverse instruments and influences from around the world.
Jonathan Posthuma is a freelance composer and musician living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His musical style seeks to combine lyricism, evocative imagery, and intense emotional contrasts while maintaining clarity in form and function at their deepest levels. He is often inspired by natural landscapes, gardening and visual art in his compositions and his largest project is Paul Klee : Painted Songs, an ongoing collection of chamber music inspired by the paintings of Paul Klee. He received his Masters in Music Composition from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he studied with Stephen Dembski and Laura Schwendinger and also studied composition with Luke Dahn at Dordt University. Jonathan is an active member of the Twin Cities choral community and has sung with VocalEssence Chorus, Kantorei, and impulse (MPLS) which have premiered several of his choral works in recent seasons. He also works as the Artistic Planning Manager for The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.
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
Guy Klucevsek (1947-2025) was one of the world’s most versatile and highly-respected accordionists. A composer of wry wit, his works championed his instrument and drew upon elements of popular and folk music, minimalism, and the American experimental tradition. He premiered over 50 solo accordion pieces, including his own, as well as those he has commissioned from John Zorn, Mary Ellen Childs, Somei Satoh, Jerome Kitzke, Lois V Vierk, William Duckworth, Stephen Montague, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Fred Frith. His 1988 project, Polka From the Fringe, a collection of commissioned polkas by Fred Frith, Elliott Sharp, Bobby Previte, Carl Finch, et. al., toured around the world and was released on 2 cds on the eva label, and were named “best recordings 1992” on WNYC-FM’s “New Sounds” program. Klucevsek released over 20 recordings as soloist/leader on Tzadik, Winter & Winter, Starkland, Review, Intuition, CRI, and XI. In 2010, he received a United States Artists Fellowship.
According to the Los Angeles Times, composer and performer Eve Beglarian is a “humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist.” A 2017 winner of the Alpert Award in the Arts for her “prolific, engaging and surprising body of work,” she has also been awarded the 2015 Robert Rauschenberg Prize from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts for her “innovation, risk-taking, and experimentation.”
Beglarian’s current projects include a collaboration with writer/performer Karen Kandel and writer/director Mallory Catlett about women in Vicksburg from the Civil War to the present, a piece for twenty-four double basses in a grove of trees, and a song cycle setting texts by and about mid-20th-century women for the Brooklyn Art Song Society. Since 2001, she has been creating A Book of Days, “a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress…an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.” (Los Angeles Times) In 2009, “Ms. Beglarian kayaked and bicycled the length of the Mississippi River [and] has translated her findings into music of sophisticated rusticity. [Her] new Americana song cycle captures those swift currents as vividly as Mark Twain did. The works waft gracefully on her handsome folk croon and varied folk instrumentation as mysterious as their inspiration.” (New York Times) Performance projects include Brim, Songs from a Book of Days, The Story of B, Open Secrets, Hildegurls’ Ordo Virtutum, twisted tutu, and typOpera. Recordings of Eve’s music are available on ECM, Koch, New World, Canteloupe, Innova, Naxos, Kill Rock Stars, CDBaby, and Bandcamp. 
Originally from Columbia, Mississippi, Buck McDaniel is a composer, conductor, keyboardist, and improviser based in New York City. His music blends the American Minimalist tradition with a personal storytelling practice. McDaniel’s work often explores site, text, and memory, engaging both concert, sacred, and non-traditional spaces with equal depth and curiosity.His compositions have been performed and broadcast internationally, including on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, BBC Radio 3, WQXR, and NPR’s The Moth Radio Hour. His work appears in Oliver Hermanus’s film The History of Sound, starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, which premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. A frequent collaborator, McDaniel has worked with artists including Sam Smith, Nico Muhly, Sam Amidon, and Stuart Bogie.
McDaniel is a former Kulas Composer Fellow at Cleveland Public Theatre, and his projects have been supported by institutions such as the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), the Mississippi Museum of Art, and the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art. His work has been presented by the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, among others. His music and interdisciplinary projects have been covered by The New York Times, Time Out New York, and Relix. Recordings of his work are available on Etymology, Gold Bolus, and Telarc labels. He serves as Artist-in-Residence at The General Theological Seminary and Director of Music at the Church of Our Saviour, Murray Hill and Chapel of the Sacred Hearts, Kips Bay. About the WORKSSparrow Grass (2025)
By Heather Barringer Sparrow Grass is grounded in the history, biology, horticulture, and family lore surrounding that most delicious spring perennial, asparagus. A perennial, it's origins are in Asia, but it has been cultivated and foraged around the world and arrived in North America with early colonists. My mother tended an asparagus bed, patiently nurturing spring spears through the three years it takes to establish the crowns before a harvest can occur. After that, her asparagus nourished our family year after year. A properly tended bed will deliver culinary delight for 20 years or more, but grassy weeds and lapses in fertilization are a continual threat. Asparagus is one of the first vegetables to be available in the northland, with crowns poking through the wet and chilly May mornings. It's season, ending by the 4th of July, is brief. Midsummer, the plant explodes into tall, feathery fronds as it works to capture the energy of the sun and bustle it down to the cellar of it's roots. Fall and winter dormancy serves it well, and a nice insulating cover of leaves and snow bodes well for the following year. My grandmother did not bother with asparagus, and said that her family, and those around her, never ate the plant, being put off by it's abundance in ditches and proximity to graveyards. She said that in the times of her childhood people would plant asparagus on graves because of it's beautiful fronds and reliable annual rising. I follow in my mother's stead, and have established two asparagus patches and am soon to invest my time in a third. My children will also have plots of their own, having grown to value this reliable but brief visitor. — Heather Barringer Temazcal (1984)
by Javier Álvarez The title of this work comes from the Nahuatl (ancient aztec) word literally meaning ” water that burns”. The maracas material throughout my piece is drawn from rhythmic patterns found in most Latin-American traditional musics, namely those from the Caribbean, Mexico, Cuba, Central America, Colombia and Venezuela. In general, in these compositions the maracas play an acompaniment role within the boundaries of small instrumental ensembles. The only exception is, perhaps, that of the music from the Venezuelan flatlands, where their function surpasses that of a mere punctuation device to become a soloist in its own right. Drawing from this last instance, I envisioned a piece where the player could master short patterns and combine them with great virtuosity to construct larger and complex rhythmic structures. These could then be juxtaposed and set against analogous passages on tape, thus creating an intricate polyrhythmic web that would eventually disintegrate in smitherines, clearing the way for a traditional accompanimental style, inmersed in a sound world reminiscent of the maracas’ habitual environment. --Javier Álvarez I grew up on a farm (2023)
By Jonathan Posthuma I grew up on a farm, for Zeitgeist and fixed media, features a collection of field recordings I collected in 2013 from my childhood farm. These recordings represent an environment that no longer exists since my parents retired from hog farming shortly after they were made. As a first-generation college graduate from a rural Wisconsin community, my experiences growing up on a farm set me apart from many of my colleagues. This background is important to understanding who I am as a person and form my earliest sonic memories as a composer. Rural communities have changed dramatically in our nation with sharp contrasts between urban and rural life. As an artist with one foot in urban life and the other in my childhood memories on the farm, I feel torn between two worlds, often feeling like I don't belong in either. —Jonathan Posthuma Closed 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. Tangocide (1984)
by Guy Klucvesek Tangocide is one of several works created by Klucvesek that could be easily arranged for many different instrument combinations, reflected the composers delight in engaging with musicians and ensembles throughout the world. This work is an offbeat tango in honor of the connection between that dance form and Klucvesek's beloved accordion. Island of the Sirens (2011)
by Eve Beglarian The Island of the SirensThe Island of the Sirens (2011) is a piece about defective transcription and the failures of translation. I started with a recording of a warning siren I heard in Plaquemine, Louisiana, while I was traveling down the Mississippi River in the autumn of 2009. I sliced the warning siren into eight layers of partials and then asked the computer to transcribe those eight recordings into musical notation. Because the computer’s transcription algorithm was confused by the sounds, the resulting scores were quite strange. I recorded eight women singing these transcriptions, and mixed them in quasi-unison against the eight layers of electronically transformed siren. I then made three separate submixes of the electronics, which are fed into three sets of headphones for the backup performers, who can be instrumentalists or singers. The backup chorus is asked to perform in real time what they are hearing in their headphones, a task at which they will invariably fail to fulfill entirely successfully, creating yet more quasi-unison layers that deviate from the actual sound of the transformed siren. The lead vocal, a setting of Rilke’s poem about the impossibility of describing an experience to those who haven’t shared it, is the only notated music in the piece. It also incorporates elements I heard in the siren recording, filtered through my own biases and limitations. When his hosts would ask him late in the evening to tell of his voyages and the perils they brought, the words came easily enough, but he never knew just how to convey the fear and with what startling language to let them perceive, as he had, that distant island turn to gold across the blue and sudden stillness of the sea. The sight of it announces a menace different from the storm and fury which had always signaled danger. Silently it casts its spell upon the sailors. They know that on that golden island there is sometimes a singing– and they lean on their oars, like blind men, as though imprisoned by the stillness. That quiet contains all that is. It enters the ear as if it were the other side of the singing that no one resists. Rainer Maria Rilke, from New Poems Joanna Macy, Anita Barrow, translators The Island of the Sirens was written for the New York ensemble loadbang, and is dedicated to the band with vast affection. — Eve Beglarian Scherzo in Four Movements sland of the Sirens (2011)
by Buck McDaniel Scherzo in Four Movements obsesses over a Reich-ian relationship between the two mallet instruments (think Music for 18 Musicians), yet its harmonic shifts are more severe. The opening section of the second movement, Sections, is a reaction to the texture of the second movement of Andrew Rindfleisch’s Nightsinging. I’ve completely changed the harmonic content, and the work develops in an entirely unrelated way. A music history professor in school described a Scherzo as a joke, but not necessarily a funny joke. As in, the joke can be cruel, or "on you." The heart of the piece is this absurd Beethoven-ian "BAH-dah-dump" gesture. You’ll hear it when you hear it. — Buck McDaniel 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.
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