A Musical Bridge Between Two Worlds

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The music that will be performed at the next Present Music concert “features compositions and composers that present a dichotomy in their own depth and identity as musicians,” says the ensemble’s artistic director Kevin Stalheim; music that will explore contrasts as well as parallels between traditional folk music and contemporary classical music. Appropriately enough, the concert is titled “Between Two Worlds: A Concert Bridging Traditional Folk and New Classical.” But before we go further, what on Earth, you may be wondering, is “contemporary classical music”?

“New classical” and “contemporary classical” are terms that sound oxymoronic. After all, “new” and “contemporary” are adjectives generally taken to mean modern, recently made, not yet used and so forth. And “classical” (especially in reference to music) means compositions of the 18th and early 19th centuries. More loosely, it refers to “serious” or “intellectual” music (as opposed to rock, pop and, yes, folk music). Modern music ensembles have to deal with such inexact—and seemingly conflicting and confusing—descriptors quite routinely.

Present Music itself tends to use the phrases “new music” or “music of living composers” as a way to conjure (especially for potential concert-goers) what they will be in for at one of their shows, but such phrases don’t really elucidate matters much better than anything else. To be quite frank about it, the best way to find out what Present Music is up to is to simply go to one of their concerts, watch and listen. In so doing, a whole new world of musical expression will open up before you.

Journeys Through New Music

Present Music’s upcoming concert—“a journey crossing a musical multiverse,” as they put it—features guest conductor David Bloom and composer Sarah Goldfeather; the latter will both premiere and perform three of her new musical pieces. Maestro Bloom is a founding co-artistic director and conductor of Contemporaneous—a 21-member New York-based ensemble that performs new music. Bloom has conducted more than 200 world premieres with new music groups around the country. He’s been here before and, in that previous appearance with Present Music, the Shepherd Express described him as evincing “enthusiastic commitment and exactness.”

Bloom recently commissioned a song cycle for his Contemporaneous chamber orchestra from Brooklyn, N.Y.-based violinist and singer-songwriter Sarah Goldfeather. The Minnesota native, who currently leads an indie-folk-rock band with Ethan Woods and Robby Bowen, will be here in person with Bloom for this concert. She has a full-length album, Patchwork Quilt (2016), and an EP, Goldfeather (2014), previously released and is in the midst of creating a new album.

Goldfeather is also founder, co-director and violinist of the seven-piece Exceptet ensemble; half of the soprano-violin duo Cipher; and co-founder and vocalist for a new electronics band, RSP. Concertgoers will hear a short set of her recently composed works Greasy Glass, In Dreaming and HAUL (“Harvest and Uncommon Light”).

Socolofsky, Trueman, Mattingly, Dennehy

“I have never come from a small place. I’ve spent my life jumping around from Edinburgh to Chicago to Pittsburgh—city after city after city,” says composer Annika Socolofsky. But, she reflects, “in Ann Arbor, Mich., my fiddle and I were swallowed, heads-first, into the traditional Irish music scene.” Such an experience as that, she says, led to her 2015 composition, a sense of who. “That…sense of belonging, that sense of friendship, that sense of love, that sense of community, that sense of grounding, that inkling of a sense of who… It’s been growing. And that is everything,” she explains.

The letter “w” kept coming to mind as composer, fiddle player, improviser, new instrument creator and software designer Dan Trueman’s Symphony of W’s was forming in his mind. “The footsteps of a drunkard walking wobbly towards an abyss…an old time tune called ‘Ways of the World’…an obscure Robert Frost poem, ‘Warning,’ which I set more than 25 years ago,” Trueman explains. “I can’t deny that I was also hoping to reclaim this wonderful letter from its political associations in some small way,” he adds. “It’s full of zigs and zags and pizzazz and deserves better.” Present Music also performs his short piece for hardanger fiddle, Orton’s Ode.

Oakland, Calif.-born Dylan Mattingly was co-director of a youth-run new music organization that played only music written in their lifetimes called Formerly Known as Classical. He’s currently a cellist with (and, with David Bloom, co-artistic director of) Contemporaneous. Present Music performs Mattingly’s 2010 composition, Lighthouse (Refugee Music by a Pacific Expatriate).

In 1997, Donnacha Dennehy returned after many years abroad studying music to his native Dublin, Ireland, and founded Crash Ensemble—a contemporary music group for which he’s composed several works. He also took up lecturing in music at the city’s famed Trinity College. As a member of Aosdána, Ireland’s state-sponsored academy of artists, Dennehy is Ireland’s foremost modern composer. He’s penned works for full and chamber orchestra, small ensemble with voice, instrumental ensembles of various sizes and solo and electroacoustic music—all this quite prolifically—for the past 26 years. Dennehy’s 2009 piece for seven (or more) instrumentalists, As An Nós, originally commissioned by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, rounds out Present Music’s concert program.

The across-the-world festivities will continue even after Present Music’s “Between Two Worlds” concert. In the lobby of the Zelazo Center, attendees will hear Milwaukee bluegrass duo Jesse Walker’s Hitch perform and see a video light show by artist Wes Tank. There will also be a photo booth featuring artist Sally Duback’s 7-by-9-foot mosaic, Last Dance on a Hot Planet.

Saturday, March 24, at 7:30 p.m. in UW-Milwaukee’s Helene Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts, 2419 E. Kenwood Blvd. For tickets, call 414-271-0711 or visit presentmusic.org/events/between-two-worlds.