Art through Time: A Long Overdue Update

It’s high time I’ve written about what I’ve been up to lately, as the last couple of months have been very exciting indeed. Here’s a rundown of past, current, and future projects.

Mozart amongst the Clouds (22 September 2018)

Elizabeth, Courtney, and Matt (my dear friends from my undergraduate days at Winona State) and I have long wanted to work together on something. For years we talked about a project where I would compose some miniatures for violin, viola, and piano. Elizabeth, Courtney, and I would perform the music while Matt would paint miniature paintings in response to the music. The idea being that Matt would paint during the performance and therefore have only a handful of minutes to create something brand new.

This idea for whatever reason never quite came to be. (Perhaps it will some day.) Instead, Elizabeth, Courtney, and I started looking through various works for violin, viola, and piano, and we quickly settled on Mozart’s Kegelstatt Trio. We were all fascinated with the long tradition of performing music in homes, as the Kegelstatt Trio received its premiere in the home of Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin, a friend of Mozart’s. Performing the trio in Courtney and Matt’s home became the first part of the plan, so Matt and I sat down together to discuss how we would involve him.

Matt is an avid animator, so he and I quickly settled on a project where I would write music and he would create an animation that would compliment the music. In previous collaborative projects, the process usually involved me responding to a work of art that was already completed (whether it was Gabriel Pionkowski’s interest in the void, Traci Brimhall’s poems of aubades, Harlan Chambers’s research in the Nanking Massacre, or Adrienne Louise Kleinman’s love of cats), but this time I was so happy to create the art first and Matt would respond to what I created. And what he created was so special, indeed! We will be releasing the animation on the various video platforms soon (hopefully in the next month or so), as we first are working on a professional recording of the music. In the meantime, I can share that images of clouds figured heavily in Matt’s four-minute animation, so I decided to call the work Nuages (i.e. French for clouds).

The outcome of all our work was a delightful afternoon of music, animation, food, and wine. Courtney and Matt were gracious hosts as they opened their home to 25 of our friends and family. We served cucumber sandwiches, cheeses, fruits, wine, cookies, and pies, performed the Mozart trio, then performed the Nuages piece, projecting Matt’s animation on the wall as we played. Everyone I spoke to afterwards seemed so, so moved by the whole afternoon, and I just can’t wait to release the animation to the Internet for everyone to see.

I’m also really excited for the future of my work with Matt. We already have initial plans for a longer animation, and I think it’s going to be great!

Eno amongst the Airports (18 October 2018 at Dead Media in Minneapolis)

The second project I’m working on involves musician Adam Biel. We’ve also long wanted to perform together, and finally this will be a reality. Adam is very interested in ambient music and drones, and some years back we got together to improvise. I created various free-tonal gestures on piano, and he created colorful drones on guitar. For whatever reason, we never shared our improvisations for a public performance, but I remained keen on performing something with Adam. Eventually, we settled on performing our own rendition of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports.

I hope you can join us at Dead Media on 18 October at 7:00pm. Northern Isolation is hosting the event, and the evening will also feature the music of Modify and Neon Menhirs. I’m so excited that Adam and I will finally be performing together. I think we’ve created some really gorgeous music, and we would love to see you there.

Art amongst the Times

Lastly, every Friday evening in October at SpringHouse Ministry Center in Minneapolis, I will be working with movement and spoken word artist Tera Kilbride et al for a series of improvisatory performances of music, dance, and spoken word called Improv SNAP. I don’t mean to short shrift important details at the moment, but I will have more to share in the coming days. We have another rehearsal tomorrow night where we will be making many important decisions. I will be able to write more about this series in the next couple of days.

Tera and I have already had a couple of successful street performances downtown, most recently on the 600 block of Nicollet Mall just today on 26 September. I had a really great time playing piano while Tera danced, and we both performed some spoken word as well. Tera and I both agreed that today’s performance was especially magical. “We created a play that no one saw,” she remarked. Some day, people will see it, though.

The Minneapolis Downtown Improvement District and On Nicollet host these street shows, and they are a very welcome addition to all the events downtown. I look forward to being a part of them again, and I can’t wait to perform the Improv SNAP series next month.