When someone gets angry with me and says, “That’s not music,”
that the concert hall has become a playground for pointless games,
then I think to myself:
“That’s my guy! That’s the person I need to get through to.”
When other people tell me that my music is “very interesting”
—that’s below the belt.
I know that young composers still have—
or are getting back to—
the expectation of being able to shake things up
in society.
Of “rubbing salt in the wound.”
I think that’s moving, and I respect their
intentions.
But it’s also naïve,
and they end up sacrificing aesthetic rigor.
Besides:
who am I to rub salt into the wound?I am the wound.
The usual order of things is a way of repressing
inner chaos, of keeping that in check.
The society we live in is absolutely not free.
We’re dominated, contaminated, paralyzed,
anesthetized, debilitated by so many commercial influences.
There’s a black hole of idiocy out there,
and it’s just waiting to suck us in.
That’s just as disastrous as any ideology.
Within our system, I think art has to stand out as an opportunity for what I’ve called adventure.
It has to be a journey for the soul.
We have to be able to expand the horizons of our experiences,
but also recognize ourselves as beings who are capable of reflecting on our conscious horizons.
To use Ernst Bloch’s words,
art helps us to be aware of our own limits and transcend them.
That’s decisive.
It’s an experience of responsibility,
and happiness.
Some people have this idea of almost an
avant-garde idyll.
They’re supposed to feel comfortable there,
at home, almost.
With my music, I’ve always wanted to go naked into the lion’s den:
the bourgeois concert hall.
And it’s not about being crazy or provocative with my sounds or actions.
It’s about new, or newly-considered, contexts;
about reorienting the act of listening.
All music should be an invitation to rethink music.
And that comes along with a certain existential
confusion.
That people will think of music as a magical,
comforting medium is unavoidable.
-Helmut Lachenmann
Studio Z
275 E 4th st suite 200
st. paul, mn
directions and Parking
Schedule
October 19, Friday
7:30pm New Music for Voice: Nina Dante
9:00pm Kafka Fragments by György Kurtág, featuring Bethany Battafarano and Yumhali Garcia
October 20, Saturday
7:30pm Chamber Music
October 21, Sunday
3:00pm Opera Screening: Infinite Now by Chaya Czernowin
7:30pm Portrait Concert: Helmut Lachenmann
tickets and festival pass
$5 per event
$20 for Festival Pass
Children under 18 are free.
programs
October 19 | 7:30 pm
New Music for Voice: Nina Dante
Aggeloi III à 6 (2010)
Stratis Minakakis
Si Chavela met Matta – I (2018)
Pablo Santiago Chin
Mythologies (section F) (2016)
Pablo Santiago Chin
*Alamargo (2018)
Bethany Younge
*Mais mes mains (2018)
Tiffany M. Skidmore
*Una mal ejempla (2018)
Nina Dante
*world premiere
about nina dante
Soprano/vocalist Nina Dante is a soloist, chamber musician, and improviser based in NYC and Chicago. She is interested in musical experimentation and the continual discovery of the voice’s technical ability and emotive power.
Dante is co-founder and soprano of the new music ensemble Fonema Consort, which specializes in avant-garde chamber music for voice and instruments, with special focus on the music of Latin American composers. Her work in new music involves constant collaboration with composers to expand modern vocal repertoire and technique. Recent collaborators include: Pablo Chin, Bethany Younge, Juan Campoverde, Tiffany Skidmore, Clara Olivares, Chris Mercer, Stratis Minakakis and Ben Vida.
With Fonema Consort, Dante has performed in residencies and given lecture-performances at Oberlin Conservatory, UC Berkeley, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, Scripps College, the 113 Composers Collective, New England Conservatory, Drew University, North Central College, Saint Xavier University, and High Concept Laboratories.
She has participated in festivals and concert series including Resonant Bodies, BAM, Lampo, Contempo, Performa, Indexical, Visiones Sonoras, the Festival Internacional Chihuahua, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo, the Experimental Sound Studio, New Music Miami, the Latino Music Festival, the Frequency Festival, the Ear Taxi Festival, the Goethe Institut, the Renaissance Society of Chicago, and National Sawdust’s Original Music Workshop.
Dante’s improvisational and compositional practices gives her the opportunity to explore her own voice and musical impulses.
She can be heard on Fonema Consort albums Pasos en otra calle (New Focus Recordings) and FIFTH TABLEAU (Parlour Tapes+). Dante graduated manga cum laude from Northwestern University in 2010 with a Bachelor of Arts in Vocal Performance. From 2008-2009 she studied in Paris at the École normale de musique; and participated in the 2012 Darmstadt Ferienkurse.
2018-2019 performance highlights include performances at Roulette, Issue Project Room, solo and chamber performances on the 113 Composers Collective Festival, the New Music Miami Festival, and the New England Conservatory faculty recital of Stratis Minakakis and Bert van Herck. Commissions this year include works by Bethany Younge, Stratis Minakakis and Pablo Chin
Program Notes
Stratis Minakakis – Aggeloi III à 6
Greek composer Stratis Minakakis’ music is founded on aspects of ancient Greek cultural identity (theater, literature and philosophy) while simultaneously pressing forward into the musical avant garde. In his music, I feel the gravitational pull of our ancient artistic roots. I sense an urgent need to communicate directly, and the score seems to exist to open a channel of communication between the performer/music and the audience, rather than as an artifact itself.
Of his own music, Minakakis says, “In many of my works, I search for the primordial voice. A voice deeply rooted in the body, a voice that utters our innermost emotions without the filter of stylization… I prefer musical material that is raw, that is to say it mimics physical gestures and phenomena, such as breathing, shouting, whispering, the pulsation of the heart, the undulation of sea waves; and material that makes references to archetypal musical expressions, such as lamentations, drones, and heterophonic singing.”
Aggeloi III à 6 for solo voice is a setting of the final messenger scene from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. In this scene, having run many miles at a furious speed, the messenger recounts the miraculous ascension of Oedipus to the skeptical Athenians. Proud and deeply emotional, Aggeloi III à 6 directly references classical theater, and exists in a soundworld halfway between the ancient and the modern.
Pablo Santiago Chin – Si Chavela met Matta and Mythologies section F
In addition to being co-founders of our ensemble Fonema Consort, Costa Rican composer Pablo Chin and I have been musical collaborators since 2010. Together we have developed a body of work that documents our artistic coming-of-ages. From the wild 7 Studies on Chapter 34 (2011) to the suppressed energy of Si Chavela met Matta (2018), Chin’s vocal works experiment with the capabilities of the voice and new compositional practices. The beauty and bizarreness of his writing and the unforced theatricality that emerges from it maintains the vocalist as story-teller, though with the most modern of means at her disposal and a sense of personal artistic freedom that is of central importance to Chin.
From Chin’s program note: Si Chavela met Matta explores the voice of iconic Mexican singer of Costa Rican birth, Chavela Vargas, transforming a recording of her a capella singing via electronic means, by drawing curves on a touchpad hooked to a granular synthesizer. The “drawings” mimic the electric traces in Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta’s painting le coeur de l’oeil, thus adding new contours and inflections to Chavela’s singing while preserving her timbral and expressive essence. This piece fantasizes with a fictional encounter between two major Latin American artists of dissimilar fields but of matching artistic intensity.
Chin’s Mythologies in its full form is a trio for voice, clarinet and viola. Based on the dialogue of the three witches from Shakespeare’s Scottish play, it is a roiling and lusciously bizarre work. Section F is for solo voice alone, which is being presented as a tape piece tonight, interspersed with recordings of Bethany Young and me chanting the witches’ classic lines: “Double, double toil and trouble,/ Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”
Bethany Younge – Alamargo, from her opera-in-progress
This world premiere by American composer Bethany Younge is an excerpt for a larger opera-in-progress for Fonema Consort for performing instrumentalists and singer. The entire opera will be backed by a tape track of the performers reading individual fantastical texts for each performer, written by me and notated into music by Younge. The stage action will focus on the dissection/surgical exploration of the performers’ instruments and the sonic world that results.
Younge takes compositional risks in a way that I rarely see. Her work is unusually constructed and notated, and its content is so unique to her that it is succulently unfamiliar when first confronting it. The payoff: an unexpectedly organic experience with material that feels personal. Her compositional interests are constantly on the move, but what stays constant is a continual experimentation with language and a unique theatricality born of the apocalyptic severity of her music.
This project will be our third collaboration, which began with her quartet Bodyscape (for which I wrote the text, and which Fonema performed at our 113 residency in 2016), and her staged vocal quartet Speech Factory.
From Younge’s program note: I am thoroughly invested in empowerment through vulnerability; I am thoroughly invested in explicit self-evaluation; I am not thoroughly invested in the treatment of instruments as objects.
I would like to see what happens when a singer I know makes her instrument vulnerable. (exposing her teeth, her lips, her cheeks, her throat)
I would like to see what happens when she problematizes her instrument through her practice. (retracing her vocal warmups as pillars)
She would like to speak from a distance, a loudspeaker, providing her with the space to reflect upon her words. She is finally an idealization of herself, a sacred figure soaking up her faults, her contradictions. The stakes are higher here.
Tiffany m. Skidmore – “Mais mes mains” from The Golden Ass
American composer Tiffany Skidmore’s music brings to mind Sciarrino’s description of his own music: hearing it is like watching a volcano erupt from afar. While Skidmore’s music burns it’s own path outside of Sciarrino’s aesthetic, the description holds true. Her music often features slow moving textures dotted with energetic events (imagine a constellation moving across the sky over the course of the year, and interjecting shooting stars), a starry sound world, coldly emotional content, and a mix of musical abstraction with direct theatrical/conceptual content. For these reasons, like reading a myth of ancient times, we experience the drama of her works from a distance.
Tonight’s work is the world premiere of the closing aria of her opera-in-the-making, The Golden Ass. The opera is a setting of the Cupid and Psyche myth, and this will be the third excerpt I have sung (“no stars” with my ensemble Fonema Consort; “shuangxi” with the John Duffy Institute for New Opera). The aria is sung by Venus (young Psyche’s torturess) and revolves around the source of her abusive behavior: her concerns about aging and the fear of being supplanted by a younger and more “viable” woman. Dangerous thoughts indeed to the woman’s psyche, and still so relevant in a modern society where women have to fight for a sense of power based on the merits of our intellect/artistic output/inner-self rather than our appearance, age, and acquiescence.
Nina Dante – Una mal ejempla
My newest work draws from my improvisational practice and the full technical range of my vocal abilities. The title is drawn from a recording of “Manolo Reyes” by flamenco musicians La Niña de los Peines, Melchor de Marchena and Antonio Moreno.
Texts
Minakakis — Aggeloi III à 6
Text sourced from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. These six lines of texts are set simultaneously.
Shortly after we had left, we turned around and the man (Oedipus) was nowhere present,
While the king (Theseus) was holding up his hand covering his eyes
As if he could not bear something awesome and fearsome that had appeared,
As someone sent from the Gods or a well-meaning spirit from the profound depths of the earth.
A man departed with neither wailing nor afflicted by diseases,
But a miraculous mortal.
Chin — Si Chavela met Matta
The predominantly incomprehensible text of this piece is the result of manipulations of a recording of Chavela singing the following fragment of “Las simples cosas” a capella.
One says goodbye to little things without thinking,
Just as a tree in autumn is left without leaves.
When all’s said and done, sadness is the slow death of the simple things
And these simple things remain painful in the heart.
People always go back to those old places where they loved life,
Then they see how those old things they loved have gone away.
Because of this, girl, don’t go away dreaming that you will return,
Because love is simple, and time devours the simple things.
Chin — Mythologies, section F
Lines for the Third Witch from Act IV, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf,
Of the ravined salt-sea shark.
Root of hemlock digged i’ th’ dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat and slips of yew
Slivered in the moon’s eclipse.
Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-delivered by a drab.
Make the gruel thick and slab.
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron.
For the ingredients to our cauldron.
Younge — Alarmargo, text by Nina Dante
Alamargo comes for me
his name is bitterness
I’m all sweat and heartbeat.
I love him.
Our appointment: tonight.
Once again I confront myself, my self-incarceration.
There is a life without the paralysis
Of self-doubt and devalualization on body, on mind.
All my life I’ve run from cage to cage,
The odor of my power so real
It scared even me to the point of self-repression
The window turns into a tree branch
that I climb like a snake to the top.
The ghost of a bird passes:
I eat it.
my belly never fills.
There is a method I haven’t tried,
Not befriending
There is a path I haven’t tried.
Not up. Down.
Down the marble wall,
down the forty terraces,
down the smooth trunk,
down the splintering stairs,
down the clay cave,
down the coldest one can dig.
That feeling of fear:
I shove
That cry ‘insufficiency”:
I ignore
All the lines bombard me together:
I steel
my mind
I emerge
the other end,
My only ceiling: infinitous.
I see myself:
An eternal shout
An eternal explosion
An eternal gush
All the complexities of my being at rest with each other
And all my creative powers realized in full.
Birds burst from my mouth.
My eye a star.
My star a portal.
My movements an inundation.
My song unpronounceable.
Skidmore — “Mais mes mains”, texts by Patrick Gallagher and apuleius
but my hands
brittle
peeling
shaking
cracking
old
ugly
useless
tender
callow
delicate
how I shall punish that little deceiver
she will rifle his quiver
disarm his arrows
unbend his bow
extinguish his torch
and punish his body
i shall believe atonement has been made
when I have shaved off those locks
and cut off those pinions
composer info
bethany younge
Bethany Younge is an American composer with extensive collaborative experience with artists from other disciplines. Many of her acoustic works seek to mimic both speech and sound poetry with instruments while also dissecting words to reveal individual phonemes, illuminating a world embedded with complex semiotical relations between the spoken word and what is interpreted to be "music."
Bethany is pursuing her DMA at Columbia University in New York, with previous degrees from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and Oberlin Conservatory.
She has worked with ensembles including Jack Quartet, Asko | Schönberg Ensemble, KLANG, Fonema Consort, Mocrep, Ekmeles.
She was awarded the 2016 Stipend Prize at the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt.
stratis minakakis
Stratis Minakakis is a composer and conductor whose creative work engages issues of memory, cultural identity, and art as social testimony; it also explores the rich possibilities engendered by the interaction between arts and sciences.
As a composer, he has collaborated with leading performers and ensembles such as The Crossing, the PRISM and Stockholm saxophone quartets, the Harry Partch ensemble, the Arditti String Quartet, Ensemble Counter)induction, Noh actress Ryoko Ayoki, recorder virtuoso Tosiya Suzuki, and flutist Orlando Cela.
Minakakis studied at the Atheneaum Conservatory, Princeton University, the New England Conservatory, and the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a professor at the New England Conservatory.
pablo santiago chin
Recent works by Chin draw inspiration from the narratives of film and literature and the use of idiosyncratic transcription methods that enable imaginative exploration of pre-existent musical sources.
His orchestral works have been performed by Scripps College, the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Heredia. His music has been commissioned by ensembles including ICE, Ensemble Recherche, Fonema Consort, and Ensemble Dal Niente.
He earned a doctoral degree from Northwestern University, and is a professor at Montclair State University.
Chin is artistic director of Fonema Consort. His work is featured on both their albums and on his 2017 album Three Burials.
tiffany m. skidmore
Tiffany M. Skidmore holds degrees in Music Composition and Vocal Performance from Gonzaga University, Eastern Washington University, and the University of Minnesota. She has studied with James Dillon, Chaya Czernowin, Jonathan Middleton, and J. Kevin Waters and her work has been featured in master classes with Brian Ferneyhough, Julio Estrada, and Michael Pisaro. Her work has been performed throughout Europe and the United States. She is a 2018 McKnight Fellow, the 2018 Zeitgeist Composer-in-Residence, a member of the American Composers Forum, and Executive Director of 113.
October 19 | 7:30 pm
kafka fragments by györgy kurtág
featuring bethany battafarano and yumhali garcia
Kafka Fragments, Op. 24 (1985–1987)
György Kurtág
Part I
1. Die Guten gehn im gleichen Schritt…
2. Wie ein Weg im Herbst
3. Verstecke
4. Ruhelos
5. Berceuse I
6. Nimmermehr (Excommunicatio)
7. »Wenn er mich immer frägt.«
8. Es zupfte mich jemand am Kleid
9. Die Weissnäherinnen
10. Szene am Bahnhof
11. Sonntag, den 19. Juli 1910 (Berceuse II) (Hommage à Jeney)
12. Meine Ohrmuschel…
13. Einmal brach ich mir das Bein
14. Umpanzert
15. Zwei Spazierstücke
16. Keine Rückkehr
17. Stolze (1910/15 November, zehn Uhr)
18. Träumend hing die Blume
19. Nichts dergleichen
Part II
1. Der wahre Weg (Hommage-message à Pierre Boulez)
Part III
1. Haben? Sein?
2. Der Coitus als Bestrafung
3. Meine Gefägnisszelle
4. Schmutzig bin ich, Milená…
5. Elendes Leben (Double)
6. Der begrenzte Kreis
7. Ziel, Weg, Zögern
8. So fest
9. Penetrant jüdisch
10. Verstecke
11. Staunend sahen wir das Grosse Pferd
12. Szene in der Elektrischen, 1910 (»Ich bat im Traum die Tänzerin Eduardowa, sie möchte doch den Csárdás noch eimal tanzen.«)
Part IV
1. Zu spät (22. Oktober 1913)
2. Eine lange Geschichte
3. In memoriam Robert Klein
4. Aus einem alten Notizbuch
5. Leoparden
6. In memoriam Johannis Pilinszky
7. Wiederum, wiederum
8. Es blendete uns die Mondnacht
about györgy kurtág
Kurtág was born at Lugos (Lugoj in Romania) on 19 February 1926. From 1940 he took piano lessons from Magda Kardos and studied composition with Max Eisikovits in Timisoara. Moving to Budapest, he enrolled at the Academy of Music in 1946 where his teachers included Sándor Veress and Ferenc Farkas (composition), Pál Kadosa (piano) and Leó Weiner (chamber music).
In 1957-58 Kurtág studied in Paris with Marianne Stein and attended the courses of Messiaen and Milhaud. As a result, he rethought his ideas on composition and marked the first work he wrote after his return to Budapest, a string quartet, as his opus 1.
In 1958-63 Kurtág worked as a répétiteur with the Béla Bartók Music Secondary School in Budapest. In 1960-80 he was répétiteur with soloists of the National Philhamonia. From 1967 he was assistant to Pál Kadosa at the Academy of Music, and the following year he was appointed professor of chamber music. He held this post until his retirement in 1986 and subsequently continued to teach at the Academy until 1993.
With increased freedom of movement in the 1990s he has worked increasingly outside Hungary, as composer in residence with the Berlin Philharmonic (1993-1994), with the Vienna Konzerthaus (1995), in the Netherlands (1996-98), in Berlin again (1998-99), and a Paris residency at the invitation of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Cité de la Musique and the Festival d’Automne.
Kurtág won the prestigious 2006 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his '...concertante...'.
György Kurtág is published by Boosey & Hawkes
program notes
In a fragment—in the suddenness and the rough breaks—we may see more than in something whole and finished. Simply by separating the short texts here from their context, making them into fragments, Kurtág lets these extracts from Kafka’s private writings expand, so that a tiny anecdote, or even just a few words, can bulge with meaning. Aligning so many of them, he allows a whole view of life to emerge in shards and spaces. Then, in setting them to music, he makes them speak. Each is a quick glance into the mirror that Kafka’s writing gave him, the mirror of an artist whose edges are his own: between irony and anxiety, between withdrawal and explosion, between creative potency and indecision.
Kurtág is, as Kafka was, someone for whom the practice of an art is a way of being, demanding total devotion, sustained through periods when very little is achieved. There is no time off. To put it another way, there is no escape. Everything is required from the artist—but not in the interests of autobiography, which is only a story about the self, whereas in Kurtág’s lean compositions and in Kafka’s similarly economical prose we meet a self entire. A voice is speaking. What it says may be fable and paradox, but those are ways to the truth.
There are other connections. Both the writer and the composer stand within a rich central European Jewish tradition, which they at once radicalize and honor. Both ask us searching questions about what we are, and about where we think we are going. Both invite us—forcibly, sinuously—to share their dedication and their honesty.
Their conjunction, in this work, seems inevitable—though Kurtág was 60 before he was ready for it to happen. Most of his earlier music was, like the Kafka-Fragmente, for a small number of performers. For 20 years, until the time of this work, he was professor of chamber music at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, coaching student ensembles and therefore in daily contact with music as conversant voices, voices talking to one another in a small room. Most of his earlier music was, too, lyrical, consisting either of vocal settings or of instrumental songs.
Apart from a viola concerto, dating from when he was himself in training at the Liszt Academy, his earliest published work is a string quartet, which he wrote in 1959, after a year in Paris. He had gone there to study with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud, but he gained much more from a psychotherapist, Marianne Stein, who helped him at what was a time of crisis.
To go further with even this capsule biography risks irrelevance, for what is important about Kurtág is all in his art, not his life. Nevertheless, there is some justification for considering this a crucial moment, if only because he himself did so in the only interview he has allowed to be published: “I realized to the point of despair that nothing I had believed to constitute the world was true.... I was staying with another pupil of Marianne Stein, an American actress, and instead of paying rent I would walk her two children in the park. The park in question was the Parc Montsouris—a magnificent place, with fantastic trees. The impression made on me by these trees in winter was maybe then my first reality. That lasted until spring, and the appearance of my second reality: birds.”
This almost reads like a Kafka fragment that Kurtág could have set. In gratitude to Stein, he dedicated his quartet, his Opus 1, to her. Nearly 30 years later, he dedicated to her another work, his longest so far, his Opus 24: the Kafka-Fragmente. That is one mark of this score’s importance.
Slow to make what he could regard as a real beginning (he was 33 years old when he finished the quartet), he was slow to continue. A wind quintet came next, in the same year of 1959, after which his creativity sputtered out in tiny instrumental pieces. He then took several years to complete his first vocal composition, The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza, a setting for soprano and piano of extracts from scalding sermons by the 16th-century preacher who was also one of the founders of Hungarian literature. Following that, he fell almost silent again, until, in 1973, he encountered unexpected delight in fulfilling a request for children’s piano pieces.
He has gone on with this project, publishing so far seven published volumes of Jatékok (“Games”), all full of fantasy, challenge, humor and instruction. Writing for children not only unlocked his creativity but also indicated how he could produce adult music having those same qualities—though he was to go on writing slowly and circumspectly. The Kafka-Fragmente were gradually assembled through the years 1985–1987; other works have taken many years to find a final form.
Most of his compositions since 1973 have been vocal settings—the word “songs” does not seem right for these intense utterances—to words by leading Hungarian poets (János Pilinszky, Dezső Tandori), by a Hungarian writing in Russian (Rimma Dalos), and latterly by international writers in whose company he by now belongs: Friedrich Hölderlin, Anna Akhmatova, Samuel Beckett and, indeed, Franz Kafka. Since the late 1980s, now widely acclaimed, he has also written works on a larger scale, including most recently ...concertante .. for violin, viola, and orchestra, his Opus 42.
The Kafka-Fragmente came as the great culmination of a period during which he had been working intensively with Hungarian soprano Adrienne Csengery. (It has been said that, with so much experience of coaching at the Liszt Academy, he treats students as if they were professionals and professionals as if they were students.) The work was written for her—in a sense, through her—and it demands from its singer an involvement paralleling the composer’s, an involvement, then, that vanishes into the task at hand.
That task is to give the most vivid expression possible to the texts, which come from Kafka’s diaries and from his letters to his closest confidante, Milená Jesenská. This is all intimate writing. The voice is an interior one, the voice with which a great writer’s mind speaks to itself, or to its second self—which is no limitation on passion, volume or variety of tone. The voice is urgent, whimsical, stentorian, vulnerable, and often all of those at once. It now sings, of course, perhaps because this is what the spirit does.
In its company is a violin, which is to some extent a twin or mirror in the same soprano register, though able to reach much higher. The violin can be an accompaniment, a bass, but more often it is above the voice, and very often what it offers is an image of what the voice is singing about, whether this be abstract or concrete: a completed circle or musicians on a tram, a pathway or furtive hiding places.
The images are compressed. Many of these fragmentary texts are compacted tales; they are like those bits of crumpled paper which, when dropped into water (the music), unfold into flowers. Even when so unfurled in these settings, a lot of them are only around a minute long, and the shortest are over in ten seconds.
A few pieces that are much longer serve to articulate the form. The 20th—“The True Path,” marking the halfway point—seems to reflect on all that has happened so far, and Kurtág isolates it as, by itself, the second of the work’s four parts. The third part returns to the disruption of the first, to end with an impression from life, touching on the whole work’s concerns with seemliness and needfulness: “Scene on the Tram.” Made largely of longer pieces, the fourth part is, as it were, the adagio finale, arriving at a resolute and strengthened clarity.
One may note how often the imagery, in the music as in the text, is of journeying. The great song cycle of the early 19th century was a travelogue: Schubert’s Winterreise. Here, from the late 20th century, is a successor. The journey, though, is all within.
-Paul Griffiths
(c) 2005 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
texts
english (Translation)
Part I
1. The good march in step…
The good march in step. Unaware of them, the others dance around them the dances of time.
2. Like a pathway in autumn
Like a pathway in autumn: hardly has it been swept clean, it is covered again with dry leaves.
3. Hiding places
There are countless hiding places, but only one slavation; but then again, there are as many paths to salvation as there are hiding places.
4. Restless
5. Berceuse I
Wrap your overcoat, O lofty dream, around the child.
6. Nevermore (Excommunication)
Nevermore, nevermore will you return to the cities, nevermore will the great bell resound above you.
7. “But he won’t stop asking me.”
“But he won’t stop asking me.” That “ah,” detatched from the second sentence, flew away like a ball across the meadow.
8. Someone tugged at my clothes
Someone tugged at my clothes but I shrugged him off.
9. The seamstresses
The seamstresses in the downpourings.
10. Scene at the station
The onlookers freeze as the train goes past.
11. Sunday, 19th July 1910 (Berceuse II) (Homage to Jeney)
Slept, woke, slept, woke, miserable life.
12. My ear…
My ear felt fresh to the touch, rough, cool, juicy, like a leaf.
13. Once I broke my leg (Hasidic dance)
Once I broke my leg: it was the most wonderful experience of my life.
14. Enarmored
For a moment I felt enarmored.
15. Two walking-sticks (Authentic-plagal)
On the stock of Balzac’s walking-stick: “I surmount all obstacles.” On mine: “All obstacles surmount me.” They have that “all” in common.
16. No going back
From a certain point on, there is no going back. That is the point to reach.
17. Pride (15th November 1910, 10 o’clock)
I will not let myself be made tired. I will dive into my story even if that should lacerate my face.
18. The flower hung dreamily (Homage to Schumann)
The flower hung dreamily on its tall stem. Dusk enveloped it.
19. Nothing of the kind
Nothing of the kind, nothing of the kind.
Part II
1. The true path (Homage-message to Pierre Boulez)
The true path goes by way of a rope that is suspended not high up, but rather just above the ground. Its purpose seems to be more to make one stumble than to be walked on.
Part III
1. To have? to be?
There is no “to have,” only a “to be,” a “to be” longing for the last breath, for suffocation.
2. Coitus as punishment (Canticulum Mariæ Magdalanæ)
Coitus as punishment of the happiness of being together.
3. My fortress
My prison cell, my fortress.
4. I am dirty, Milená…
I am dirty, Milená, endlessly dirty, that it why I make such a fuss about cleanliness. None sing as purely as those in deepest Hell; it is their singing that we take for the singing of Angels.
5. Miserable life (Double)
Slept, woke, slept, woke, miserable life.
6. The closed circle
The closed circle is pure.
7. Destination, path, hesitation
There is a destination, but no path to it; what we call a path is hesitation.
8. As tightly
As tightly as the hand holds the stone. It holds it so tight only to cast it as far off as it can. Yet even that distance the path will reach.
9. Offensively Jewish
In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world.
10. Hiding places
There are countless hiding places, but only one salvation; but then again, there are as many paths to salvation as there are hiding places.
11. Amazed, we saw the great horse
Amazed, we saw the great horse. It broke through the ceiling of our room. The cloudy sky scudded weakly along its mighty silouette as its mane streamed in the wind.
12. Scene on a tram, 1910 (“In a dream I asked the dancer Eduardowa if she would kindly dance the csárdás once more.”)
The dancer Eduardowa, a music lover, travels everywhere, even on the tram, in the company of two violinists whom she frequently calls upon to play. For there is no ban on playing on the tram, provided the playing is good, it is pleasing to the other passengers, and it is free of charge, that is to say, the hat is not passed around afterwards. However, it is initially somewhat surprsing, and for a little while everyone considers it unseemly. But at full speed, with a powerful current of air, and in a quiet street, it sounds nice.
Part IV
1. Too late (22nd October 1913)
Too late. The sweetness of sorrow and of love. To be smiled at by her in a row-boat. That was the most wonderful of all. Always just the yearning to die and the surviving, that alone is love.
2. A long story
I look a girl in the eye and it was a very long love story with thunder and kisses and lightning. I live fast.
3. In memoriam Robert Klein
Though the hounds are still in the courtyard, the fame will not escape, no matter how they race through the woods.
4. From an old notebook
Now, in the evening, having studied since six in the morning, I notice that my left hand has for some time been gripping the fingers of my right in commiseration.
5. Leopards
Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial jugs dry; this is repeated, again and again, until it is possible to calcultate in advance when they will come, and it becomes part of the ceremony.
6. In memoriam Johannis Pilinszky
I can’t actually…tell a story, in fact I am almost unable even to speak; when I try to tell it, I usually feel the way small children might when they try to take their first steps.
7. Again, again
Again, again, exiled far away, exiled far away. Mountains, desert, a vast country to be wandered through.
8. The moonlit night dazzled us
The moonlit night dazzled us. Birds shrieked in the trees. There was a rush of wind in the fields. We crawled through the dust, a pair of snakes.
german (original)
I. Teil
1. Die Guten gehn im gleichen Schritt…
Die Guten gehn im gleichen Schritt. Ohne von ihnen zu wissen, tanzen die anderen um sie die Tänze der Zeit.
2. Wie ein Weg im Herbst
Wie ein Weg im Herbst: Kaum ist er rein gekehrt, bedeckt er sich wieder mit den trockenen Blättern.
3. Verstecke
Verstecke sind unzählige, Rettung nur eine, aber Möglichkeiten der Rettung wieder so viele wie Verstecke.
4. Ruhelos
5. Berceuse I
Schlage deinen Manel, hoher Traum, um das Kind.
6. Nimmermehr (Excommunicatio)
Nimmermehr, nimmermehr kehrst du wieder die Städte, nimmermehr tönt die grosse Glocke über dir.
7. »Wenn er mich immer frägt«
»Wenn er mich immer frägt.« Das ä, losgelöst vom Satz, flog dahin wie ein Ball auf der Wiese.
8. Es zupfte mich jemand am Kleid
Es zupfte mich jemand am Kleid, aber ich schüttelte ihn ab.
9. Die Weissnäherinnen
Die Weissnäherinnen in den Regengüssen.
10. Szene am Bahnhof
Die Zuscheuer erstarren, wenn der Zug vorbeifahrt.
11. Sonntag, den 19. Juli 1910 (Berceuse II) (Hommage à Jeney)
Geschlafen, aufgewacht, geschlafen, aufgewacht, elendes Leben.
12. Meine Ohrmuschel…
Meine Ohrmuschel fühlte sich frisch, rauh, saltig an wie ein Blatt.
13. Einmal brach ich mir das Bein (Chassidischer Tanz)
Einmal brach ich mir das Bei, es war das schönste Erlebnis meines Lebens.
14. Umpanzert
Einen Augenblick lang fühlte ich mich umpanzert.
15. Zwei Spazierstücke (Authentisch-Plagal)
Auf Balzacs Spazierstockgriff: Ich breche all Hindernisse. Auf meinem: Mich brechen alle Hindernisse. Gemeinsam ist das »alle.«
16. Keine Rückkehr
Von einem gewissen Punkt an gibt es keine Rückkehr mehr. Dieser Punkt ist zu erreichen.
17. Stolze (1910/15 November, zehn Uhr)
Ich werde mich nicht müde werden lassen. Ich werde in meine Novelle hineinspringen und wenn es mir das Gesicht zerscheiden sollte.
18. Träumend hing die Blume (Hommage à Schumann)
Träumend hing die Blume am hohen Stengel. Abenddämmerung umzog sie.
19. Nichts dergleichen
Nichts dergleichen, nichts dergleichen.
II. Teil
1. Der wahre Weg (Hommage-message à Pierre Boulez)
Der Wahre Weg geht über ein Seil, das nicht in der Höhe gespannt ist, sondern knapp über den Boden. Es scheint mehr bestimmt, stolpern zu machen, als begangen zu werden.
III. Teil
1. Haben? Sein?
Es gibt kein Habe, nur ein Sein, nur ein nach letztem Atem, nach Ersticken verlangendes Sein.
2. Der Coitus als Bestrafung (Canticulum Mariæ Magdalanæ)
Der Coitus als Bestrafung des Glückes des Beisammenseins.
3. Meine Gefägnisszelle
Meine Gefägnisszelle, meine Festung.
4. Schmutzig bin ich, Milená…
Schmutzig bin ich, Milená, endlos schmutzig, darum mache ich ein solces Gechrei mit der Reinheit. Niemand singt so rein als die, welche in der tiefsten Hölle sind; was wir für den Gesang der Engle halten, ist ihr Gesang
5. Elendes Leben (Double)
Geschlafen, aufgewacht, geschlafen, aufgewacht, elendes Leben.
6. Der begrenzte Kreis
Der begrenzte Kreis ist rein.
7. Ziel, Weg, Zögern
Es gibt ein Ziel, aber keinen Weg; was wir Weg nennen, ist Zögern.
8. So fest
So fest wie die Hand den Stein hält. Sie hält ihn aber fest, nur um ihn desto weiter zu verwerfen. Aber auch in jene Weite führt der Weg.
9. Penetrant jüdisch
Im Kampft zwischen dir und der Welt sekundiere der Welt.
10. Verstecke
Verstecke sind unzählige, Rettung nur eine, aber Möglichkeiten der Rettung wieder so viele wie Verstecke.
11. Staunend sahen wir das Grosse Pferd
Staunend sahen wir das grosse Pferd. Es durchbrach das Dach unserer Stube. Der bewölkte Himmel zog sich schwach entlang des gewaltigen Umrisses, und rauschend flog die Mähne im Wind.
12. Szene in der Elektrischen, 1910 (»Ich bat im Traum die Tänzerin Eduardowa, sie möchte doch den Csárdás noch eimal tanzen.«)
Die Tänzerin Eduardowa, eine Liebhaberin der Musik, fährt wie überall so auch in der Elektrischen in Begleitung zweier Violinisten, die sie Häufig spielen lät. Denn es besteht kein Verbot, warum in der Elektrischen nicht gespielt werden dürfte, wenn das Spiel gut, den Mitfahrenden angenehm ist und nichts kostet, das heisst, wenn nachher nicht eingesammelt wird. Es ist allerdings im Anfang ein wenig überraschend, und ein Weilchen lang findet jeder, es sei unpassend. Aber bei voller Fahrt, starkem Luftzug und stiller Gasse klingt es hübsch.
IV. Teil
1. Zu spät (22. Oktober 1913)
Zu spät. Die Süssigkeit der Trauer und der Liebe. Von ihr angelächelt werden im Boot. Das war das Allerschönste. Immer nur das Verlangen, zu sterben und das Sich-nochHalten, das allein ist Liebe.
2. Eine lange Geschichte
Ich sehe einem Mädchen in die Augen, und es war eine sehf lange Liebesgeschichte mit Donner und Küssen und Blitz. Ich lebe rasch.
3. In memoriam Robert Klein
Noch spielen die Jagdhunde im Hof, aber das Wild entgeht ihnen nicht, so dehr es jetzt schon durch die Wälder jagt.
4. Aus einem alten Notizbuch
Jetzt am Abend, nachdem ich von sechs Uhr früh an geiernt habe, bemerkte ich, wie meine linke Hand die rechte schon ein Weilchen lang aus Mitleid bei den Fingern umfasst hielt.
5. Leoparden
Leoparden brechen in den Tempel ein und saufen die Opferkürge leer; das wiederholt sich immer wieder; schliesslich kann man es vorausberechnen, und es wird ein Teil der Zeremonie.
6. In memoriam Johannis Pilinszky
Ich kann…nicht eigentlich erzählen, ja fast nicht einmal reden; wenn ich erzähle, habe ich meistens ein Gefüh, wie es kleine Kinder haben könnten, die die ersten Gehversuche machen.
7. Wiederum, wiederum
Wiederum, wiederum, weit verbannt, weit verbannt. Berge, Wüste, weites Land gilt es zu durchwandern.
8. Es blendete uns die Mondnacht
Es blendete uns die Mondnacht. Vögel schrien von Baum zu Baum. In den Feldern sauste es. Wie krochen durch den Staub ein Schlangenpaar.
performer info
bethany battafarano
Bethany Battafarano, soprano, finds her niche in early, choral, and contemporary classical music. She has sung with The Rose Ensemble, Minnesota Chorale, Apollo Master Chorale, Oratory Bach Ensemble, First Readings Project, and The Singers – Minnesota Choral Artists. With The Rose Ensemble, Battafarano celebrated the release of her first CD, Christmas in Baroque Malta, and she toured Spain, France, Germany, and across the United States.
In 2017, Battafarano co-founded the professional chamber choir Border CrosSing, for which she sings and is Deputy Director. After just eight months, Border CrosSing will soon complete its fifth program. Battafarano is co-founder of the chamber treble ensemble Artemis, which performs contemporary classical music and experimental improvisation. Artemis recently completed a commission by French artist Laure Prouvost, the Walker Art Center, and Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in New York. Battafarano is co-founder of the new trio (tentatively “BETH”), which collaborates with Twin Cities composer Victoria Malawey on music for soprano, violin, and double bass.
Battafarano holds a BA in Music, Anthropology, and Psychology from Macalester College.
yumhali garcia
During his career as a professional violinist, Yumhali Garcia has been a recipient of many awards, fellowships, and he has been a winner of several competitions such as the FONCA Study Abroad Fellowship, Kalamazoo Symphony Scholarship, Conservatorio de las Rosas Violin Performance Competition, Western Michigan University Teaching Assistantship, Schubert Club Fellowship, just to name a few.
As a classical performer, Yumhali has participated in recitals and concerts as a soloist and a chamber musician. He has presented these performances in important halls in the USA, Mexico and Colombia such as the Minnesota Orchestra Hall, Ocampo Theater, Mexico City Palace of Fine Arts, Minnesota History Museum, Landmark Center, Manuel Felguerez Theater, and others. As a soloist, Yumhali has been accompanied by the Michoacan University Symphony Orchestra, the Queretaro Symphony Orchestra, and the Conservatorio de las Rosas Chamber Orchestra. He has been featured as a guest artist in prestigious music festivals such as the Zacatecas Violin Encounter and the Miguel Bernal Jimenez International Music Festival.
Apart from his more traditional classical violin training, Yumhali is an avid folk music performer from his native country Mexico. He is involved in the outreach of this music, which has enabled him to teach and perform folk music workshops, concerts, didactic performances.
Yumhali holds a bachelor’s degree in Violin Performance from the Conservatorio de las Rosas and a master’s degree in Violin Performance obtained from the Western Michigan University. Most recently, he received his Doctor in Musical Arts degree from the University of Minnesota in 2017. Yumhali currently lives in the DC area, where he is actively involved in the teaching, outreach and performance of the different facets of his music career.
October 20 | 7:30 pm
chamber music
featuring the music of jeremy wagner
and call-for-scores selected composers
please do not (2017)
for bass flute, bass clarinet, percussion, soprano
inti figgis-vizueta
*Utopia (omaggio a Luciano Berio) (2014)
For solo flute
Christian dimpker
*A Greater Revelation (2015)
for flute and clarinet
james erber
-Intermission-
*untitled on earth (2017)
for double bass and cymbal
pedro alvarez
*La disparition (2018)
for solo bass flute
jeremy wagner
P.I.TCH (2017)
for violin and video
valentin pelisch
*world premiere
about jeremy wagner
Jeremy Wagner
Jeremy Wagner is a composer and new music professional currently living and working in the Bay Area. His compositions draw on simulations of physical systems and mathematical processes to illuminate the talents of highly-specialized virtuosi performers. Jeremy holds Ph.D. & Masters degrees in Composition from the University of Minnesota as well as a degree in Composition & Performance from Wichita State University. He frequently appears as sound designer and electronic music performer with major ensembles and festivals worldwide and currently serves as Research Composer for the Center for New Music & Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California, Berkeley.
about call-for-scores composers
Christian Dimpker
Dimpker’s compositions explore unconventional fields of notation. In order to be able to do this, he has developed an extensive notation system for extended playing techniques as well as electroacoustic music. This treatise with the title Extended Notation: The Depiction of the Unconventional has been released by the LIT Verlag publishers. Dimpker has received numerous awards and grants for his works, while his pieces have been performed internationally (inter alia SWR Experimentalstudio, St John’s Smith Square, Künstlerdorf Schöppingen Foundation, RWE/innogy foundation, German Artist Fund, State of Berlin, Tokyo Wonder Site or CMMR conference).
James Erber
James Erber (born 1951 in London) studied Music at the Universities of Sussex and Nottingham and Composition with Brian Ferneyhough in Freiburg. He has also worked in music publishing and education
His music has been widely performed and broadcast. It includes Epitomaria-Glosaria-Commentaria for 25 solo strings (1981-84), two string quartets (1992-94 and 2010-11), Das Buch Bahir for 9 instruments (2004-2005), Elided Dilapidations for piano (2014-15) and The Death of the Kings for 11 instruments (2007-18)
In 2013, Matteo Cesari's recording of the monumental ‘Traces’ cycle (1991-2006) for solo flute appeared to great critical acclaim on the Convivium label.
Pedro Alvarez
Pedro Alvarez is an independent composer, improviser, and scholar, born in Chile and currently based in Western Australia. His creative work focuses on new forms of sonic narrative made of static situations, articulating simplicity of form in contrast with highly detailed textures. Research interests include aesthetics and politics, postcolonialism, and musical thinking since the 1960’s. Alvarez studied composition with Cirilo Vila in Santiago, with James Dillon in London, and with Liza Lim in Huddersfield, obtaining a PhD in 2014. He has been hosted as composer-in-residence in Vienna and in Mexico, and receives commissions from festivals and ensembles around the world.
Valentin Pelisch
His work explores the sonic, visual and conceptual matter of chamber music. Different performers presented his works in spaces of America, Europe and Asia. In 2015 participated as resident composer of KulturKontakt-Austria, as resident composer of the Goethe-Institut Platform for Music-Theatre, and as guest composer of the Contemporary Music Festival of Panama. In 2017 he participated as resident composer of the 7th International Young Composers Academy in Tchaikovsky City, Russia. In 2018 his music is being programmed at different festivals and theaters in the USA, Russia, Austria, Spain and Argentina. He studied composition with Gerardo Gandini and Marcelo Delgado in Buenos Aires.
Inti figgis-vizueta
inti figgis-vizueta is a non-binary Quechua/Latinx experimental composer from Washington, D.C. They strive to create works that emphasize the performer’s perceptions and physical self, focusing on procedure and interaction based musics.Through the integration of intersectional and liberation principles into the compositional process, inti believes the subversive barriers between composer, player, and audience can be broken down, promoting a growth in performance practice and community. inti studies with Felipe Lara. they were recently composer-in-residence for Quorum, a Boston-based LGBT vocal ensemble and are currently a curator for scorefollower’s 2018/2019 season.
performer info
Nina Dante
Soprano/vocalist Nina Dante is a soloist, chamber musician, and improviser based in NYC and Chicago. She is interested in musical experimentation and the continual discovery of the voice’s technical ability and emotive power.
Dante is co-founder and soprano of the new music ensemble Fonema Consort, which specializes in avant-garde chamber music for voice and instruments, with special focus on the music of Latin American composers. Her work in new music involves constant collaboration with composers to expand modern vocal repertoire and technique. Recent collaborators include: Pablo Chin, Bethany Younge, Juan Campoverde, Tiffany Skidmore, Clara Olivares, Chris Mercer, Stratis Minakakis and Ben Vida.
With Fonema Consort, Dante has performed in residencies and given lecture-performances at Oberlin Conservatory, UC Berkeley, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, Scripps College, the 113 Composers Collective, New England Conservatory, Drew University, North Central College, Saint Xavier University, and High Concept Laboratories.
She has participated in festivals and concert series including Resonant Bodies, BAM, Lampo, Contempo, Performa, Indexical, Visiones Sonoras, the Festival Internacional Chihuahua, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo, the Experimental Sound Studio, New Music Miami, the Latino Music Festival, the Frequency Festival, the Ear Taxi Festival, the Goethe Institut, the Renaissance Society of Chicago, and National Sawdust’s Original Music Workshop.
Dante’s improvisational and compositional practices gives her the opportunity to explore her own voice and musical impulses.
She can be heard on Fonema Consort albums Pasos en otra calle (New Focus Recordings) and FIFTH TABLEAU (Parlour Tapes+). Dante graduated manga cum laude from Northwestern University in 2010 with a Bachelor of Arts in Vocal Performance. From 2008-2009 she studied in Paris at the École normale de musique; and participated in the 2012 Darmstadt Ferienkurse.
2018-2019 performance highlights include performances at Roulette, Issue Project Room, solo and chamber performances on the 113 Composers Collective Festival, the New Music Miami Festival, and the New England Conservatory faculty recital of Stratis Minakakis and Bert van Herck. Commissions this year include works by Bethany Younge, Stratis Minakakis and Pablo Chin
James DeVoll
James DeVoll is a flutist based in the Twin Cities. He has worked with many composers and premiered several pieces for flute in a variety of settings. Locally, he enjoys collaborating with the composers of 113 and is a member of Strains new music ensemble. He teaches at Gustavus Adolphus College and Minnesota State University in Mankato. He studied at the University of Minnesota, Yale, and CCM, with additional studies in France with Mario Caroli and Sophie Cherrier.
Jeremy Johnston
Dr. Jeremy R. Johnston is an active performer and educator of percussion based in the Twin Cities, MN. As a performer, he regularly performs with symphony orchestras and recitals of solo and chamber music. Johnston teaches percussion and jazz at Saint Mary’s University in Winona, Minnesota and directs percussion programs at Blaine High School, Maple Grove Senior High, and Andover High School. In addition to these teaching responsibilities, Johnston enjoys running his private studio and running his small business, Marim-Bar. He holds degrees from Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, Illinois State University, and the University of Minnesota.
Paul Schimming
Paul Schimming is an active freelance clarinetist in the Twin Cities and beyond, and has performed with groups such as the Minnesota Orchestra, Charleston Symphony Orchestra, Mill City Opera, Green Bay Symphony Orchestra, and with members of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. He has presented recitals and masterclasses throughout the United States and was featured on Minnesota Public Radio’s Regional Spotlight series. An avid performer of contemporary music, he has worked with numerous ensembles and composers to champion new works for clarinet. Paul received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, as well as degrees from Arizona State University and Kansas State University.
Irving Steinberg
Born in Willingboro, New Jersey, Irving Steinberg grew up in San Francisco, California and started studying the double bass in the public school system. He received his Bachelor’s degree in music from the University of California at Berkeley and his Master of music degree from Boston University. His teachers include Charles Siani, Brian Marcus, Edwin Barker, George Neikrug, Todd Seeber, and Jim Orleans. He has performed with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops Orchestra, Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, Virginia Symphony Orchestra, Richmond Symphony Orchestra, Boston Landmarks Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Springfield Symphony Orchestra, Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Ballet, Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra, Portland Symphony Orchestra, and Albany Symphony Orchestra. Twice a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center (‘97 - ’98), he has also participated in the 11th New Music Festival Sound Ways, in St. Petersburg, Russia ('99), New Hampshire Music Festival (’99, 2000), Spoleto Festival USA (‘95 - ’98, 2000), and Festival Dei Due Mondi, Spoleto, Italy (’95).
October 21 | 3:00 pm
opera screening: infinite now
by chaya czernowin
This screening is 2.5 hours, presented without pause. Please make use of the facilities beforehand and plan accordingly.
Composer: Chaya Czernowin
Director: Luk Perceval
Stage & Video: Phillip Bussmann
Electronics: IRCAM / Carlo Laurenzi in collaboration with Chaya Czernowin
Conductor: Titus Engel
Duration: 2½ hours
Structure: 6 Acts
Commissioned by: Vlaamse Opera Antwerp & Ghent (Belgium), Mannheim Stadttheater (Germany), and IRCAM (France)
Performances: premiere on April 18, 2017, at the Vlaamse Opera Ghent. Infinite now was presented 15 times in Antwerp, Ghent, and Mannheim between April 18 and June 21, 2017. On June 14, it was given a semi-staged performance at the Paris Philharmonie.
Forces
There are two casts for Infinite now’s two texts:
Homecoming
Three singers: Noa Frenkel (contra alto), Karen Vourc’h (soprano), David Fry (bass)
All voices form a blurred unison meta-voice. In addition to this, the recorded voice of Weiwei Xu, is used and treated as music.
Front
Six actors: Didier de Neck (Luitenant De Wit / Van Outryve), Roy Aernouts (Soldat Seghers), Gilles Wellinski (Kolonel Magots), Oana Solomon (Sister Elisabeth), Rainer Süßmilch (Paul Bäumer), Benjamin-Lew Klon (Stanislaus Katczinsky)
Three singers: Kai Rüütel (mezzo soprano), Terry Wey (countertenor), Vincenzo Neri (baritone)
All three voices combine together to create a meta-voice, singing in slow unison which changes its colors with the change of the dynamic individually for the single voices within the unified unison. This voice lifts up words or sentences from Front and creates a layer of singing or at times creates a sensitive passage between the spoken and the sung between the theater to music.
4 instrumental soloists: Nico Couck and Yaron Deutsch (amplified acoustic guitar and electric guitar); Severine Ballon and Christina Meissner (cellos)
Orchestra: large orchestra with 3 percussionists
Electronics: IRCAM, 2–3 performers
About infinite now
Infinite now is an experience, a state: in the midst of a morass, the presence of an imminent disaster. What is going on, how long, when will it end — all is unclear. It is an existential state of nakedness where the ordinary sense of control and reason are stripped away. This situation is somewhat familiar, we taste it to some degree throughout life, even if the extraordinary does not happen. As the rate of distribution of information grows and as the political situations around us seem more precarious and unpredictable we all get a slight taste of this feeling of naked helplessness. However when war happens or disaster hits something basic changes, as the last remnants of security and routine are taken away. It is an extreme situation, on an existential level. But it holds also an opportunity for an exceptional encounter with the world, bringing its own perspective and long term consequences, historical and personal. In a way, every such a morass, is a blockade which stops the evolution of things and might then result in a sudden change. That change is felt in the air and its intuited presence is extremely forceful simultaneously frightening and hopeful.
The opera uses texts from two sources: a short story: Homecoming by the celebrated Chinese writer Can Xue, and the play Front (Luk Perceval) which is based on All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, and on letters of soldiers from the first world war, which were assembled and shaped into a theater piece by Luk Perceval. Both texts enact a suspension; people are unable to get out of a static situation. In Front soldiers are in the trenches, locked in fighting which does not end: they move some kilometers forward only to return back to their former position in a desperate deadly cycle. In Homecoming, a woman thought to pass through a house and continue her journey but then she gradually realizes that it is impossible to leave the house, which is on a cliff above an abyss where a quiet old man serves as an illusionary guide and gives some solace with his presence.
Homecoming with its chaotic internal and external landscape and Front with the extended war situation and the various forms of suffering it causes are both testimonies to what I would like to call the wild uncontrolled breathing of the world as it moves closer towards a state of entropy, or towards change, an inevitable change. The deep meaning here is not only historical. The slow merging of two seemingly unconnected worlds gradually creates a kind of an amalgam. This amalgam suggests a state of mind of such difficulty and helplessness, that in order to survive, one must find the will to continue and to find hope in the simplest element of existence, the breathing. As per David Grossmann, “in pain there is breath.” In that sense while the spoken and sung materials become strong and very visceral and present at the end, they also become further away more like islands in the midst of wind and breathing which slowly cover everything like sand in a sandstorm in the desert.
In this sense, the opera is about more than Homecoming or the first World war. It is about our existence now and here. How we survive, how are destined to survive and how even the smallest element of vitality commends survival and with it perhaps hope.
The piece is dedicated to my students.
About chaya czernowin
Chaya Czernowin was born and brought up in Israel. After her studies in Israel, at the age of 25, she continued studying in Germany (DAAD grant), the US, and then was invited to live in Japan (Asahi Shimbun Fellowship and American NEA grant) Tokyo, in Germany (a fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude) and in Vienna. Her music has been performed throughout the world, by some of the best orchestras and performers of new music, and she has held a professorship at UCSD, and was the first woman to be appointed as a composition professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria (2006–2009), and at Harvard University, USA (2009 and on) where she has been the Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music. Together with Jean-Baptiste Jolly, the director of Akademie Schloss Solitude near Stuttgart and with composer Steven Kazuo Takasugi, she has founded the summer Academy at Schloss Solitude, a biannual course for composers. Takasugi and Czernowin also teach at Tzlil Meudcan, an international course based in Israel founded by Yaron Deutsch of Ensemble Nikel.
Czernowin’s output includes chamber and orchestral music, with and without electronics. Her works were played in most of the significant new music festival in Europe and also in Japan Korea, Australia, US and Canada. She composed 3 large scale works for the stage: Pnima...ins Innere (2000, Munich Biennale) chosen to be the best premiere of the year by Opernwelt yearly critic survey, Adama (2004/5) with Mozart's Zaide (Salzburg Festival 2006) Adama has a second version written with Ludger Engles, with an added choir which was presented in Freiburg Stadttheater (2017). The opera Infinite Now was written in 2017. The piece, combines/ superimposes materials of the first world war (Luk Perceval theater piece "FRONT") with the short story Homecoming by Can Xue. Also this opera was chosen as the premier of the year in the international critics survey of Opernwelt. Czernowin was appointed Artist in residence at the Salzburg Festival in 2005/6 and at the Lucern Festival, Switzerland in 2013. Characteristic of her work are working with metaphor as a means of reaching a sound world which is unfamiliar; the use of noise and physical parameters as weight, textural surface (as in smoothness or roughness etc), problematization of time and unfolding and shifting of scale in order to create a vital, visceral and direct sonic experience. all this with the aim of reaching a music of the subconscious which goes beyond style conventions or rationality.
In addition to numerous other prizes, Czernowin represented Israel at Uncesco composer's Rostrum 1980; was awarded the DAAD scholarship ('83–85); Stipendiumpreis ('88) and Kranichsteiner Musikpreis ('92), at Darmstadt Fereinkurse; IRCAM (Paris) reading panel commission ('98); scholarships of SWR experimental Studio Freiburg ('98, '00, '01 etc); The composer’s prize of Siemens Foundation ('03); the Rockefeller Foundation, ('04); a nomination as a fellow to the Wissenschaftkolleg Berlin ('08); Fromm Foundation Award ('09); and Guggenheim Foundation fellowship ('11); Heidelberger Kunstlerinen Preis ('16); The WERGO portrait CD The Quiet (5 orchestral pieces) has been awarded the Quarterly German Record Critics’ Award ('16 ). She was chosen as a member of the Akademie der Kuenste in Berlin in 2017.
Czernowin's work is published by Schott. Her music is recorded on Mode records NY, Wergo, Col Legno, Deutsche Gramophone, Kairos, Neos, Ethos, Telos and Einstein Records. She lives near Boston with composer Steven Kazuo Takasugi.
October 21 | 7:30 pm
portrait concert:
helmut lachenmann
Guero
for solo piano
featuring benjamin downs
Allegro Sostenuto
for clarinet, cello, piano
featuring pat o’keefe, rebeccah parker downs, benjamin downs
Pression
for solo cello
featuring joey crane
temA
for flute, cello, soprano
featuring james devoll, rebeccah parker downs, nina dante
Consolation II
for 16 voices
featuring matthew abernathy, heather barringer, joey crane, nina dante, gabrielle doran, svea drentlaw, michael duffy, katherine eakright, laura ann kushel, liam moore, pat o’keefe, chelsie propst, tiffany M. skidmore, walt skidmore, justin anthony spenner, krissanne weiss, adam zahller
about helmut lachenmann
Helmut Lachenmann (born on November 27, 1935 in Stuttgart,Germany) studied piano, theory, and counterpoint at the Music Conservatory in Stuttgart from 1955 to 1958, and from 1958 to 1960 he studied composition with Luigi Nono in Venice. The first public performances of Lachenmann’s works took place at the Biennale in Venice in 1962 and at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt. After teaching at the University in Ludwigsburg, Lachenmann taught as professor for composition at the Music Conservatory in Hannover (1976–81) and in Stuttgart (1981–99). In 2008, Lachenmann was the Fromm Visiting Professor at the Harvard University, and in 2010 he became fellow of the Royal College of Music, London. Lachenmann has received numerous awards for his compositional work, including the Siemens Musikpreis in 1997, the Royal Philharmonic Society Award London in 2004, and the Berliner Kunstpreis and the Leone d’oro of the Biennale di Venezia in 2008. Lachenmann is a honorary doctor at the Music Conservatory Hannover and a member of the Academies of the Arts in Berlin, Brussels, Hamburg, Leipzig, Mannheim, and Munich. His works are performed at many festivals and concert series in Germany and abroad.
performer info
Nina Dante
Soprano/vocalist Nina Dante is a soloist, chamber musician, and improviser based in NYC and Chicago. She is interested in musical experimentation and the continual discovery of the voice’s technical ability and emotive power.
Dante is co-founder and soprano of the new music ensemble Fonema Consort, which specializes in avant-garde chamber music for voice and instruments, with special focus on the music of Latin American composers. Her work in new music involves constant collaboration with composers to expand modern vocal repertoire and technique. Recent collaborators include: Pablo Chin, Bethany Younge, Juan Campoverde, Tiffany Skidmore, Clara Olivares, Chris Mercer, Stratis Minakakis and Ben Vida.
With Fonema Consort, Dante has performed in residencies and given lecture-performances at Oberlin Conservatory, UC Berkeley, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, Scripps College, the 113 Composers Collective, New England Conservatory, Drew University, North Central College, Saint Xavier University, and High Concept Laboratories.
She has participated in festivals and concert series including Resonant Bodies, BAM, Lampo, Contempo, Performa, Indexical, Visiones Sonoras, the Festival Internacional Chihuahua, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo, the Experimental Sound Studio, New Music Miami, the Latino Music Festival, the Frequency Festival, the Ear Taxi Festival, the Goethe Institut, the Renaissance Society of Chicago, and National Sawdust’s Original Music Workshop.
Dante’s improvisational and compositional practices gives her the opportunity to explore her own voice and musical impulses.
She can be heard on Fonema Consort albums Pasos en otra calle (New Focus Recordings) and FIFTH TABLEAU (Parlour Tapes+). Dante graduated manga cum laude from Northwestern University in 2010 with a Bachelor of Arts in Vocal Performance. From 2008-2009 she studied in Paris at the École normale de musique; and participated in the 2012 Darmstadt Ferienkurse.
2018-2019 performance highlights include performances at Roulette, Issue Project Room, solo and chamber performances on the 113 Composers Collective Festival, the New Music Miami Festival, and the New England Conservatory faculty recital of Stratis Minakakis and Bert van Herck. Commissions this year include works by Bethany Younge, Stratis Minakakis and Pablo Chin
Heather Barringer
Percussionist Heather Barringer graduated from the University of Wisconsin, River Falls with a bachelor’s in Music Education in 1987 and studied at the University of Cincinnati-College Conservatory, studying with Allen Otte from 1988-90. She is executive director and percussionist with Zeitgeist, is a member of Mary Ellen Child’s ensemble, Crash, and has worked with many Twin Cities organizations, including Nautilus Music Theater Ensemble, Ten Thousand Things Theater, Minnesota Dance Theater, and Aby Wolf.
James DeVoll
James DeVoll is a flutist based in the Twin Cities. He has worked with many composers and premiered several pieces for flute in a variety of settings. Locally, he enjoys collaborating with the composers of 113 and is a member of Strains new music ensemble. He teaches at Gustavus Adolphus College and Minnesota State University in Mankato. He studied at the University of Minnesota, Yale, and CCM, with additional studies in France with Mario Caroli and Sophie Cherrier.
Pat O’Keefe
Pat O'Keefe is active in a variety of musical genres. He has performed as a soloist with symphony orchestras, wailed away for belly dancers, and rocked samba in the streets. He is the woodwind player for the ensemble Zeitgeist, and also performs with Batucada do Norte, Choro Borealis, No Territories, and The Maithree Ensemble. Pat holds a BM from Indiana University, an MM from New England Conservatory, and a DMA from the University of California, San Diego. In 2015 he was awarded a Performing Musician Fellowship from the McKnight Foundation. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls.
Rebeccah Parker Downs
Rebeccah Parker Downs stays active as a professional chamber musician, orchestral musician, and private lesson teacher. She maintains a thriving home Suzuki studio and is also faculty at MacPhail Center for Music, and St. Joseph’s School for Music. She holds a Masters degree and Artist Diploma in cello performance from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) as a student of Yehuda Hanani. She has Suzuki method training through book 3 with both Nancy Hair and Barbara Wampner and has completed long term Suzuki method training (a 2 year program) at the New York School for Strings in Manhattan studying with Pamela Devenport for books 1-10.
Rebeccah has soloed with several orchestras around the country, performing the Lalo Cello Concerto, the Elgar Cello Concerto, and the Faure Elegie. She is a founding member of Piace Duo and performs around the country and Europe with her husband, Benjamin Downs, an accomplished pianist. Rebeccah plays on a William Whedbee cello thanks to the generous contributions of the Medici Foundation.
Benjamin Downs
Benjamin Downs is a musician and scholar specializing in music since 1968. He completed his DMA in piano performance in 2010 and received his PhD in 2018, focusing on European modernist music and philosophies of listening. Before settling in the great Midwest, he was prizewinner at several international competitions including the MTNA, Chautauqua, and Cincinnati Chamber Music competitions and performed throughout the United States and Western Europe. He has been supported by many grants including a Fulbright Grant, Graduate Council Fellowship, and McKnight Artist Development Grant. He now teaches at Macalester College and the MacPhail Center for Music.
Matthew Abernathy
Emerging American conductor Matthew Abernathy is currently on staff at Minnesota Opera, where he is Music Director of Project Opera, the company’s nationally recognized youth opera program, and Chorus Master for the Minnesota Opera Children’s Chorus. Known for his work as a Chorus Master, Mr. Abernathy has led Minnesota Opera’s professional opera chorus in productions of Don Pasquale, and has prepared the children's chorus for La Bohème and Dead Man Walking. Mr. Abernathy passion for contemporary music has led him to collaborations with a host of inventive composers, among them Ben Moore, Imant Raminsh, Jonathan Dove, Meredith Monk, and Michael Sitton.
Gabrielle Doran
Gabrielle Doran is a soprano with a voice especially suited to the extremes of very old or very new music. She enjoys working with 113 to expand and enhance musical form and boundaries. Gabby currently performs in small ensembles throughout the Twin Cities such as Border CrosSing, the Gregorian Singers, and the Bach Society of Minnesota, as well as being a weekly cantor at the Cathedral of Saint Paul. She lives in Saint Paul with her husband and four children.
Kathryn Eakright
Kathryn Eakright graduated from the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire with a Bachelor's Degree in Music Education. While at UWEC, she was a member of the Women's Concert Choral, the Symphonic Choir, and the Vocal Jazz Ensemble. After graduating, she moved to the Twin Cities and began singing with Exultate Chamber Choir and Orchestra, of which she is still a member. She has also sung with Hymnos Vocal Ensemble, MN Pop-Up Choir and The Gregorian Singers. Kathryn works at an insurance company, and serves on The Gregorian Singers’ board. This is the second project Kathryn has done with 113.
Chelsie Propst
Chelsie Propst (soprano) is an active performer of both early and modern music based in Madison, WI. She is currently a member of the Rose Ensemble, the Mirandola Ensemble, and the Madison Choral Project. She also regularly appears on Milwaukee’s Present Music concert series and has collaborated with contemporary ensembles Clocks in Motion and Sound out Loud. In addition to her ensemble work, Chelsie performs as a recitalist and concert soloist. Recent stage appearances include Second Woman and Belinda in Purcell's Dido & Aeneas, L'Amour in Rameau's Pygmalion, and Donna Elvira in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Historical Musicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
KrisAnne Weiss
KrisAnne Weiss, mezzo-soprano, is a Minneapolis-based singer and voice teacher who is active in concert, recital, and music-theater of all kinds. Upcoming performances include the role of the Secretary in Arbeit Opera Theatre’s production of The Consul in St. Paul in November. As an actor/narrator, KrisAnne joins chamber ensemble Zeitgeist for a multimedia performance of Crocus Hill Ghost Story during their Halloween Festival this month. Teaching is a central passion for KrisAnne; she works privately with voice students of all ages, levels, and musical aspirations, and she is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at St. Olaf College for 2018-2019.
Laura Ann Kuschel
Recently returning home to the Twin Cities, Laura Ann Kuschel has been extremely active in regional choral music and small group ensembles. After receiving her Bachelor of Music degree in Vocal Performance from the University of South Dakota, Kuschel performed with the South Dakota Chorale, Sounds of South Dakota, and cantored for several area churches. Now happily back in the land of 10,000 Lakes, Kuschel has joined the Gregorian Singers, and Chorus Sancti Petri while deepening her already strong Minnesota accent. She is excited for this, her first, performance with Collaborative 113.
Liam Moore
Liam Moore enjoys writing and performing music of many shapes and colors. He is interested in language and the evolution of our universe. Liam lives in Saint Paul and is currently writing a chamber pop album.
Adam Zahller
Adam Zahller (b. 1988) is a composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist based in the Twin Cities. He performs regularly in various contexts: from rock clubs to chamber choirs to dance/theater music to experimental concert series. His concert works have received premieres from Loadbang, Duo Gelland, Mark Robson, and the Eclipse Quartet. He also does occasional sound-design work for visual artists, and has spent a great deal of time in K-12 education. He holds a B.M. in music composition from the Chapman Conservatory, where he studied under Jeffrey Holmes and Sean Heim, and an M.A. in music composition from the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities), where he studied under James Dillon.
Svea Drentlaw
Svea Drentlaw is a multi-instrumentalist and singer with various groups throughout the Twin Cities, including the Gregorian Singers and SlovCzech. After growing up in music and theater within her community of Northfield, Minnesota, Svea continued her music education at Grinnell College. Currently, Svea creates visual art as well as music and continues to focus on learning every instrument she can get her hands on. She is very excited to be able to perform Consolation II again with 113 and is grateful for the opportunity to share this rarely-performed piece with a wider audience.
michael duffy
I, Michael Duffy (b. 1976), am a composer/sound artist/performer whose work has been performed by Dal Niente, Irvine Arditti, Noriko Kawai, Duo Gelland, JACK, ICE, Second Instrumental Unit, and Zeitgeist. I am a member of the 113 composers collective, perform in the electro-acoustic duo Shield Your Eyes and in the band Hive. I co-founded the Contemporary Music Workshop at the University of Minnesota where I studied with James Dillon and work as the Music Technology Specialist.
Prior to moving to Minneapolis in 2006, I attended the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, CUNY studying composition with Jeff Nichols and Bruce Saylor, computer music with Hubert Howe and percussion with Michael Lipsey.
I love all sorts of so-called extreme music.
Justin Anthony Spenner
Justin Anthony Spenner is a Minneapolis-based Baritone known for his artistic honesty and engaging versatility. Recent stage performances include Morales and Dancaïro (Carmen) with Pine Mountain Music Festival, 2nd Priest/Armored Man (Zauberflöte) with Lakes Area Music Festival, and Billy Bigelow (Carousel) with American Gothic. As a soloist, he has recently performed with South Metro Chorale, The Northstar Consort, and Dakota Valley Symphony, as well as being a regular collaborator with 113. Justin is the Co-Founder of B-Sides Art Song Collective, an organization which strives to draw a lineage between classical art song and contemporary commercial music.
Tiffany Skidmore
Tiffany M. Skidmore holds degrees in Music Composition and Vocal Performance from Gonzaga University, Eastern Washington University, and the University of Minnesota. She has studied with James Dillon, Chaya Czernowin, Jonathan Middleton, and J. Kevin Waters and her work has been featured in master classes with Brian Ferneyhough, Julio Estrada, and Michael Pisaro. Her work has been performed throughout Europe and the United States. She is a 2018 McKnight Fellow, the 2018 Zeitgeist Composer-in-Residence, a member of the American Composers Forum, and Executive Director of 113.
Walt Skidmore
Walt Skidmore works as a software developer and makes music whenever he can. Though primarily a trumpet player, he also plays guitar, bass, and piano, and many other instruments. He performs regularly with the Minnesota State Band, Mississippi Valley Orchestra, and St. Croix Brass. When not working or making music, he spends time with his wife, Tiffany, children, and menagerie of pets. He's happy to be a part of the Consolation II choir.
Joey Crane
Joey Crane is a composer, cellist, and guitarist. He holds degrees in music composition from University of Missouri-Kansas City, University of Louisville, and University of Minnesota. His primary instructors were James Mobberley, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Paul Rudy, Steve Rouse, Kryzysztof Wolek, and James Dillon. He was a founding member of Tin Foil Ensemble in Kansas City, Bonecrusher in Louisville, and 113 in Minneapolis, MN. He has performed works by John Zorn, Earle Brown, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Toru Takemitsu, and Helmut Lachenmann. His works have been performed by the Cleveland Graduate String Quartet, the Brookside String Quartet, Brave New Works, Ricochet Ensemble, Duo Gelland, Euridice String Quartet, the University of Louisville Symphony Orchestra, the Park University Orchestra, Ensemble Dal Niente, and the United Instruments of Lucilin. Joey has attended the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Young Composer Program, Tutti New Music Festival at Denison University, highSCORE New Music Festival in Pavia, Italy, ORIENT/OCCIDENT New Music Festival in Kiev Ukraine, and Lucilin Summer Course in Luxembourg.
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113, a collection of composers and performers of new music, curates concerts, seminars, and master classes throughout the Twin Cities. Through ambitious programming, community building, educational outreach, and emphasis on extensive interaction between composers and performers that greatly exceeds the industry standard, 113 provides a platform for musicians pursuing bold, personalized artistic visions, and helps them to transmit those visions as directly and honestly as possible to a receptive audience, unfettered by university politics, market pressures, or established conventions.
Since its inception in 2012, 113 has presented over sixty world premieres and worked with composers and performers such as Richard Barrett, Anthony Cheung, Chaya Czernowin, James Dillon, Julio Estrada, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Pisaro, Collect/Project, Duo Gelland, Ensemble Dal Niente, Fonema Consort, The Gregorian Singers, Marcelo Rilla, Bill Solomon, Strains New Music Ensemble, Milana Zaric and dozens of local musicians of the highest caliber.
Our 2018-2019 season programming includes the Twin Cities New Music Festival, and concerts of new music, residencies, and opera screenings by internationally-acclaimed composers and musicians including Chaya Czernowin, Helmut Lachenmann, György Ligeti, TAK Ensemble, Zeitgeist New Music Ensemble, and works created by students of the Folwell School Performing Arts Magnet during our 2018 educational residency.
Board of Directors:
Tiffany M. Skidmore, Executive Director; Michael Duffy, President; Justin Spenner, Vice President; Joshua Clausen, Secretary; Benjamin J. Mansavage Klein, Treasurer; Alyssa Anderson; Heather Barringer; James DeVoll; Ann Millikan; Nanyi Neil Qiang; Shannon Wettstein-Sadler
Staff:
Collin Arneson; Joey Crane, Artistic Liaison; Colin Holter, Managing Editor (Publishing Division); Sam Krahn; Jeffery Kyle Hutchins, Communication Chair and Studio 113 Chair; Joshua Musikantow, Development Chair; Tiffany M. Skidmore, Executive Director
Advisory Committee:
Anthony Cheung; James Dillon; Cecilia Gelland; Martin Gelland; Sumanth Gopinath; Billy Lackey; Patrick Marschke; Ted Moore; Bill Solomon; Schuyler Tsuda; Jeremy Wagner; Adam Zahller
