Welcome to the 21st Century

Image from Milwaukee Musaik.

“The protection of classical music as a living heritage is not limited to the preservation of works by great composers from hundreds of years ago; it is equally important to encourage the continual composition of new classical music for the contemporary era.”

That advice, from a 2024 article by Henry C.H. Shiu in the International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, might well be the guiding principle for Milwaukee Musaik’s concert on March 3. The program, titled Innovation, mixes traditional chamber works with compositions by four living writers. Playing in various groupings are Jeanyi Kim, violin; Madeleine Kabat, cello; Heather Zinninger, flute; Margaret Butler, oboe; Jay Shankar, clarinet; Rudi Heinrich, bassoon; Darcy Hamlin, horn, and Melinda Lee Masur, piano.

Old guard composers included on the program are Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) and Franz Schreker (1878-1934). Shostakovich’s Five Pieces, performed by violin, cello, and piano, comprises music he wrote for movies produced in the Soviet Union. Schreker, an Austrian composer, violinist, and educator, collaborated with a choreographer as he composed Der Wind for two interpretive dancers, Elsa and Grete Wiesenthal. The music is scored for violin, cello, clarinet, horn, and piano.

Maurice Ravel, born 150 years ago, is also represented, albeit in a manner that might especially please author Shiu. Flashback of Ravel, a work written in 2011 for violin, cello, and piano by Jean Ahn (born 1976), reimagines Ravel’s 1914 piano trio. “Suppose that a composer had a glimpse of the first movement of Ravel’s trio in a fast forward flash,” Ahn explains.

Composer Alyssa Morris (born 1984) also takes inspiration from artistic masters. Each of the four movements of Brush Strokes for flute, oboe, and bassoon is a musical portrait of an artist’s painting technique. One section interprets the images of water and light in Claude Monet’s paintings of water lilies. Another recalls Georges Seurat’s pointillist style “by frequently shifting the instrumentation and bouncing the melody from one player to another,” Morris said. “[A] slow, rhythmic pulse, and a curving melodic contour” infers Vincent Van Gogh’s loneliness. The final movement, “depicting the paint being dripped, poured, and flung onto the canvas,” conveys Jackson Pollock’s “action painting” process.

Jacob Beranek (born 1998), a native of Oconomowoc, is the youngest composer whose work is featured on the program. Beranek’s Wind Quintet was premiered in 2019 at Door County’s Midsummer’s Music Festival. Musaik performers Butler and Zinninger played for that initial performance, and are eager to introduce the work to a Milwaukee audience. Written for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and French horn, the Quintet includes passages for English horn and piccolo. Flutist Zinninger especially appreciates Beranek’s use of “the singing upper register of the English horn and the unique color of the low register of the piccolo.”

Breakdown Tango, written by John Mackey (born 1973) and commissioned by the Parsons Dance Company, closes the program.

Milwaukee Musaik will perform Innovation at 7 p.m. Monday, March 3, in the intimate concert hall at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, 1584 N. Prospect Ave., Milwaukee. Tickets are available online.