Present Music Offers Three Musical Adventures

Nathalie Joachim. Photo courtesy of Present Music.

Present Music‘s season-closing concert, on Friday, June 5, at the Milwaukee Art Museum, is built around a deceptively simple question — the one posed by its centerpiece work: Ki moun ou ye. In Haitian Kreyòl, it means, “Who are you?” The question is posed by Nathalie Joachim, the Grammy-nominated Haitian American composer, flutist and vocalist whose 11-movement song cycle gives the evening its emotional center.

The evening opens with inti figgis-vizueta‘s Form the Fabric (2020), a work unlike anything a conventional concertgoer might expect. There is no conductor standing at the podium. Conductor and artistic advisor David Bloom will listen from the house while the Present Music ensemble navigates a score that is, at its heart, a set of layered invitations rather than fixed instructions. The title comes from a phrase by archaeologist Ramiro Mato, describing the Inca Road as “threads interwoven to form the fabric of the physical and spiritual world.”

The score offers musicians information at three levels: rhythmic ideas, harmonic and pitch ideas, and a third layer of phrasing, character and specific sounds. These are not instructions to be followed in sequence but a palette to draw from, melded to a hand-drawn architectural map that traces the seven-minute piece from opening to close. Bloom describes it as deceptively demanding. “You look at the page and it’s just one or two pages of fairly simple instructions and very bare ideas, and you think, oh, this will be very easy,” he said. “But actually, the subtlety is really, really complex and requires a great deal of listening, understanding, and of trust.” A key passage in figgis-vizueta’s preface to the score addresses the question of when not to play. The players must decide, moment by moment, whether their instrument is needed in the picture being painted.

The second work on the program, Marcos Balter‘s we carry our homes within us, which allows us to fly!  (2019), takes its title from a remark by John Cage — a declaration that emotional stability and inner memory allow us to take risks without being tethered to a physical place. Balter composed the piece at the invitation of choreographers Bill T. Jones and Dianne McIntyre and the chamber group yMusic. The dance elements will not be part of this performance.

At the center of the piece is a chant from Afro-Brazilian religious communities, a creolized form of Yoruba used in Umbanda and Candomblé ceremonies. The text is a magnificent address to God: “The air of the atmosphere is your breath upon the earth, Father.” Bloom notes that Balter’s engagement with Yoruba cosmology — which runs through much of his work — is not a symbolic gesture but a committed relationship with a living system.

The second half of the evening belongs entirely to Joachim and her 11-movement song cycle Ki moun ou ye (2024). Joachim performs at the center of her own work — singing, playing flute, working with live electronics and drawing on the electronically sampled vocal textures that are her sonic signature — while an acoustic instrumental ensemble surrounds her. The work is performed in both English and Haitian Kreyòl.

The cycle is set on the remote Haitian farmland that Joachim’s family has called home for seven generations. Ki moun ou ye turns inward, toward specific people and specific questions: “Whose names are these? Where do these names come from? Who once owned us?”

“She is honoring the names, the beautiful people,” Bloom says, while at the same time going straight to the bone of the history of slavery in Haiti. The cycle moves through grief, tenderness, reclamation and defiance: from Kenbe m (Hold me), a meditation on inherited pain, to Ti nèg (Little man), which confronts the history of a word weaponized and then reclaimed, to the title movement’s unanswerable question, “Who are you?”

A conversation about Philadelphia-born Joachim inevitably raises the question of diaspora — of what it means for a culture to generate so much of its most significant art from outside its borders. Bloom suggests Joachim functions as a witness, someone who carries the story of her family and her people to audiences in the United States and beyond, bearing both the sacrifice of distance and the gift of being heard. The feeling the cycle conveys — the intensity of love across distance, the effort to find and make community — is, as Bloom puts it, “necessarily universal.”

The three composers in this concert approach the theme of home from very different angles: Joachim through the intimate, mortal weight of family history; Balter through ceremony and the philosophical idea of portable belonging; figgis-vizueta through the spatial metaphor of a road — the great Inca Road — as a fabric connecting the world. The result is an evening that asks, in different ways and different languages, the same irreducible questions that Joachim poses at its center: Who are you? Where do you come from? And what do you carry with you when you go?

Present Music with Nathalie Joachim takes place Friday, June 5, at 7:30 p.m. at the Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 N. Art Museum Dr. Tickets are available online or at the door. Tickets will also allow entry into the Milwaukee Art Museum starting at 5:30 p.m. Exhibits that link to the concert include “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World is a Mystery,” “Currents 40: Widline Cadet” and the museum’s world-renowned Haitian art collection.

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