Present Music is ending its 2017-2018 season with a walk around the garden—the Lynden Sculpture Garden. The wooded park-like landscape, adorned with works in stone and steel, has become an inspiration for Milwaukee performing artists looking to make site-specific work. For the city’s contemporary music ensemble, the acreage provides ample space for a wide array of performances pertinent to the sculptures.
The “Sound and Sight” concert is a bundle of moving parts revolving around static objects. “It’ll be a very still thing, in a sense,” explains Present Music’s artistic director Kevin Stalheim. “Usually people move past the sculptures. Here they will be frozen during three-to-five-minute performances at each sculpture. It’s not about looking at the musicians! It’s a more contemplative, observant, deeper experience with the sculpture.”
Early arrivals are encouraged to “picnic and meander,” Stalheim says. When concert time arrives, the crowd will gather and be divided in four groups identified by colored wristbands. Each group will walk along different paths through the program at its 13 destination points within the Lynden Garden. By evening’s end, each concertgoer will have seen and heard the same sculpturally inspired performances.
A few of “Sound and Sight’s” compositions already existed and were chosen for how they relate to a particular sculpture. However, most were written for the program by Stalheim and Present Music members. The program is largely aural—with some exceptions. Quasimondo Physical Theatre will enact its version of the ancient myth of Pan and Syrinx, set to Claude Debussy and accompanied by a flutist. As usual for Present Music, subtle humor will be threaded through the program. At a sculpture that reminds Stalheim of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Also Sprach Zarathustra will be performed, not by a resounding orchestra but by two individuals dwarfed by the music’s immensity.
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Part two of “Sound and Sight” will involve audience participation, including opportunities to draw pictures and make gamelan-like music with an array of pot lids. “It’s never been done this way before at Lynden Sculpture Garden,” Stalheim says. “There have been dance concerts on the grounds and people singing opera, but at ‘Sound and Sight,’ the sculpture isn’t just a backdrop. It’s a collaboration between sound and sculpture.”
5 p.m., Saturday, June 23 at Lynden Sculpture Garden, 2145 W. Brown Deer Road. For tickets, visit presentmusic.org or call 414-271-0711 ext. 3.
