Photo courtesy VISIT Milwaukee
The Milwaukee Art Museum
The Milwaukee Art Museum
Present Music’s next concert will be a homecoming for its star, Julia Holter. Born in Milwaukee in 1984, she left town at age six and hasn’t been back since. In the intervening years, she earned degrees in composition, taught herself audio recording and released several albums prominent in an emerging sonic zone—that hard to define place where “classical” music of the past 40 years overlaps with alt rock, alt folk and alt anything.
Photo by Camille Blake
Julia Holter
Julia Holter
Her music has been on the mind of Present Music’s co-artistic director, Eric Segnitz, since 2015. During that year, he heard her just-released album Have You in My Wilderness as well as Behind the Wallpaper, a composition written for her by Alex Temple. At the upcoming concert, Holter will sing Behind the Wallpaper and perform several songs with her husband, avant-garde composer Tashi Wada.
Present Music is calling the show “Baroque Pop!” in a nod to its venue, the Milwaukee Art Museum, whose current exhibition, “The Brilliance of the Spanish World,” focuses on the Baroque era. The concert will include one piece from that era, by François Couperin, in a traditional as well as a contemporary jazz arrangement by Britain’s David Gordon.
“I took the idea of the museum’s exhibit and extrapolated it to ‘60s Baroque pop music”—think The Left Banke or The Rolling Stones’ “Play with Fire”—and pop music’s effect on contemporary classical music,” Segnitz says. “The concert jumps from Baroque to jazz to contemporary to avant-garde. It covers a broad spectrum.”
Segnitz describes Behind the Wallpaper as “a great piece, so unique and surreal—hearing it is like the first time you saw Blue Velvet,” says Segnitz, describing a composition arranged for string quartet with electronics.
Aside from Behind the Wallpaper, “the concert’s through-line is the harpsichord,” he continues. The instrument will be heard on all other pieces and will be prominent on a recent work by Pulitzer-winner Caroline Shaw, her Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings. Present Music’s keyboard player John Orfe will play the Baroque instrument.
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Like arts organizations across the U.S., Present Music recently received a letter from the National Endowment for Arts, withdrawing a grant that had already been approved. Otherwise, it’s been a good 2024-25 season for Present Music with seven concerts, a street parade, a performance at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival and two albums devoted to work by composers that have been part of the ensemble’s repertoire, Carla Kihlstedt and Raven Chacon.
“Baroque Pop! with Julia Holter” will be performed Sunday, May 25 at the Milwaukee Art Museum. For tickets and more information, visit presentmusic.org.
