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You could carve a pumpkin, join the trick or treat caravan or do something smarter: attend Present Music’s “All Souls Eve” concert.
Cultures across the Northern Hemisphere have long marked the somber days when October fades into November as fall prepares for winter and the boundaries between past and present, the living and the dead, feel somehow permeable. For All Souls Eve, Milwaukee’s premier exponents of contemporary (or recent) composers will present a shape-shifting program of music that conjures the spirit(s) of the season. “It’s a mash-up of traditions with music illustrating many facets,” says PM’s co-artistic director Eric Segnitz.
Gabriela Ortiz’s Altar de Muertos: La Calaca quotes a melody from the Huichol indigenous culture of central Mexico’s Pacific shore. PM will take up her suggestion and don traditional Dia de los Muertos mask for the performance. She describes the music as encompassing the duality of existence, “sacred and profane, good and evil, night and day; joy and sorrow … a musical world full of joy, vitality and a great expressive force.”
Segnitz calls Evan Chambers “an Irish fiddle player who loves blending different musical traditions. His The Old Burying Ground is wistful, sometimes Samuel Barber-like.” Chambers was inspired to write The Old Burying Ground after walking through a colonial New Hampshire cemetery, whose gravestones proclaimed stern exhortations about life’s brevity in this world.
“Since I couldn’t imagine residents of 18th-century New England rising from the grave and singing in an operatic style, I decided to slant the songs toward musical language I’ve come to love: Irish traditional music, American folk song, sacred harp singing and Albanian polyphony, in addition to European classical music,” Chambers says.
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Music of the While is the premiere performance of a PM commission for Viet Cuong. The Vietnamese American composer drew from the songs of English Baroque composer Henry Purcell. Cuong calls on the power of those songs to “both elevate and suspend time … I set fragments of these songs in a reverberant atmosphere where melodies and bass lines echo, refract, and swirl through the ensemble. The ground bass lines—so central to Purcell’s originals—surface and sink like steady undercurrents, both anchoring and renewing the music as it circles back upon itself. The familiar lines dissolve and reassemble.” Cuong will be on hand for the concert.
“Where Have all the Flowers Gone” is a familiar song from the ‘50s folk music revival by Pete Seeger in a less familiar arrangement by his contemporary, American avant-garde composer George Crumb. Seeger’s lyric protested against the human cost of war and Crumb’s arrangement raises their ghosts amidst poignant, desolate harmonies.
The evening ends on a lighter note with Conga-Line in Hell by Uruguayan born, American resident (and Grammy nominee) Miguel del Aguila. He was inspired by a dream and incorporated a bit of Dante into music he calls “humorous, sarcastic, grotesque and also terrifying. I relied mainly on the dramatic and expressive qualities of rhythm to convey the evil forces that govern my imaginary hell.” Conga-Line combines relentless Latin American rhythms with virtuosic jazz piano. “The insistent, hypnotic conga beat is distorted and manipulated, at times shifting into devilishly complex, asymmetric meters—a tricky ‘dance macabre’ where figures from all social ranks are equally subject to human foibles,” the composer says.
There will be a preconcert talk by Kantara Souffrant, Deanna Tham and Viet Cuong, ofrendas by Francisco X Mora and parked outside, food trucks from Taqueria La Placate, La Finca Coffeehouse and more. “All Souls Eve,” Friday, Oct. 31 at the Milwaukee Art Museum. For tickets, visit presentmusic.org/events.
