You can picture it: Charles Sullivan, Early Music Now’s executive and artistic director, and Kevin Stalheim, Present Music’s founder and artistic director, glaring angrily at each other across crowded rooms, refusing to shake hands when introduced and speaking of each other in catty putdowns. After all, the organizations they head occupy opposite ends of the musical spectrum—not to mention timeline. Present Music set out 35 years ago to promote living composers while, for the past 30 years, Early Music Now’s mission has been to ignore everything after 1800.
And yet, the two musician-impresarios get on famously. “There are a lot of things we do similarly—but with different repertoire,” Sullivan says. “We’ve had world premieres of works with thematic connections to the past. And recently,” he continues, turning toward Stalheim, “you’ve reached out more to the past.”
We’re sitting together at the Rochambo coffeehouse, swapping stories and memories. When he was a young freelance musician, before establishing Present Music, Stalheim played trumpet in Sullivan’s ensembles. In the back of Sullivan’s mind still stands the idea of organizing a collective of Milwaukee musicians to perform pre-Classical music from the Medieval era through the Renaissance; with Early Music Now, he settled on booking some of the finest international touring ensembles representing those epochs. Reacting against the snobbish insularity of the 20th-century avant-garde, Stalheim was determined to present new music that had no agreed-upon name. For the sake of fun, let’s call it post-Classical.
One distinct difference between Sullivan’s and Stalheim’s endeavors: Sullivan’s concerts are, by definition, all acoustic, while Stalheim half-ruefully allows electricity. “Amplification can be murder,” Stalheim says. “It’s hard to get the sound well-balanced. Once you amplify one instrument, you start to amplify them all.”
Present Music and Early Music Now have both raised Milwaukee’s profile, each in its own area. Stalheim’s ensemble has toured internationally, commissioned world premieres and draws larger audiences in its hometown than many New York groups do in theirs, even those touted in the Times. Sullivan has had a parallel experience. “The artists we bring in often have told me that their audience here is larger than in New York,” he says.
Days before our meeting, Sullivan announced he would step down from Early Music Now at the end of the current season. “I’ve been trying to retire for five years—I’ve heard rumors you were interested in picking up Early Music Now as a side job,” he says to Stalheim, smiling. Stalheim sighs. “It’s been 35 years of my rule. I’m interested in preparing my organization for me not being there some day. I don’t do everything anymore. Last year, we even had a guest conductor—just to show that Present Music can do cool things without me.”
