Photo courtesy Present Music
Present Music ensemble with Klassik
Present Music ensemble with Klassik
At their season opener, Present Music will present differently than has become their norm. Most importantly, Milwaukee’s champion of contemporary or recent “classical music” (for lack of a better short description) will perform live in concert (with livestreaming available). And there’s something else. PM’s “Keeping Time” concert will also include a “special guest” on composer Caroline Mallonee’s Keeping Time in a Bottle, Kevin Stalheim.
Stalheim founded Present Music 40 years ago and was its artistic director until retiring in 2018. Some said he was gone from the stage for good. “It definitely took some coercion to get Kevin to participate, but it would be unthinkable without him, really! We’ll be doing a piece written for beer bottles, and the title of the concert is derived from that work,” says co-artistic director Eric Segnitz.
Oh, did I let it slip? “Keeping Time” is the start of Present Music’s 40th season.
Time moves forward (and with increasing haste) in our Newtonian everyday, but quantumly, maybe something else is going on? Says Segnitz, “This program challenges the linear notion of time—which has been scientifically debunked—and explores the wonders that can be created by those whose perceptions range far beyond our typical ‘body clocks.’”
Co-artist director David Bloom looks at it from a different angle. “You’re right that music is inherently temporal,” he says. “As musicians, we think often of the generosity with which audiences give their time to us with the idea that something really special might happen. That’s ever-present in musical performance.”
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Original Work
As has been their wont since they began, Present Music commissions original work by their contemporaries. “Keeping Time’s” world premiere of Auznieks’ Untimed links with the evening’s themes. “Untimed exemplifies this idea, with his stated goal of becoming ‘unmoored from the shackles of temporal concerns.’ The flow of the program turns the hourglass every witch-way, leading to a point where it hopefully frees the mind from traditional concepts,” Segnitz explains.
The program also includes a world premiere arrangement, commissioned by Present Music, of Daniel Kidane’s Be Still. “Keeping Time” also fulfills PM’s pledge to keep it local by adding Milwaukee jazz singer Donna Woodall on Leila Adu’s Negative Space, and keep it multimedia with dancers, choreographed by UW-Milwaukee’s Maria Gillespie, performing alongside the musicians on Tansy Davies’ Antenoux and Sigur Ros’ Gobbledigook. “One of the things we had in mind was to welcome everyone back to live performance with an eye-popping program you could not experience in two dimensions on a screen, but one that uses space and movement in creative ways,” Segnitz says.
Bloom wants to highlight Andrew Hamilton's piece, music for people who like art, featuring soprano Ariadne Greif. “The piece is one of the most intense musical experiences one can imagine,” he says. “Every time I hear this piece, I’m completely captivated in by its bold economy, breakneck speeds, humor—I'm on the edge of my seat the whole time. I've been desperate to perform it for years and am so happy to get to share that wild experience with our audience.”
Along with marking the passage of 40 years, Present Music’s season opener is an opportunity to reflect on the past year and a half. Says Bloom: “What makes time such an interesting matter to address today is this sense that our collective experience of time has been profoundly unstable in the 20 months since we last gathered with our audience. Months have felt like hours, weeks like years. This deep relativity in the experience of time is present in many of the works we've programmed. Also present—finally!—is the grounding experience of being together with others in a room to experience the stunning beauty and the greatest music of our time.”
7:30 p.m. Oct. 14-15 at the Jan Serr Studio, 2155 N. Prospect Ave. For more information, visit presentmusic.org.
