Present Music Heads To Milwaukee Art Museum Thursday

In Present Music‘s opening concert, flutist extraordinaire Claire Chase will take the audience for a cosmic journey with iconic minimalist Terry Riley’s new masterpiece, “The Holy Liftoff!” Thursday evening at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

The improvised work features eight flutes and a string quartet. Chase will play one flute while adding her recordings of the others.

The Composer

Riley has been a pioneer in the development of the minimalist style of contemporary classic music. Music professor Robert Carl declared Riley’s 1968 work In C, “one of the most enduring musical pieces of the second half of the 20th century. It is the founding document in the musical movement called minimalism, which overturned the paradigms of postwar modernism (formal complexities, atonal pitch structures, aperiodic rhythms).” Other minimalists have built out the form, notably Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, John Adams and Philip Glass.

Riley took a broader path than others. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his work became notable for its innovative use of repetition, tape music techniques, improvisation, and delay systems. Since 2020, the now 90-year-old composer and improviser has lived in a small town in Japan where he has begun to write a new type of music. He combines illustration, poetry, and his trademark musical cells to create a new type of score. These colorful sketchbooks liberate the performer from the constraints of traditional notation. They are to be freely interpreted by the performers with few parameters around duration and instrumentation.

The characteristics of Riley’s early work emerge as well in his new 2024 masterpiece The Holy Liftoff! A flexible structure of short musical cells to be repeated by performers at their individual discretion. Musicians collaborate with each other as they innovate.

The Performer

As a young arts entrepreneur and flutist, Chase is forging a new model for the commissioning, recording and live performance of contemporary classical music. She was the artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, which she co-founded in 2001, and teaches at Harvard, Brooklyn, and Princeton.

Chase was awarded the distinguished Avery Fisher Prize and a McArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship. In 2013, she inaugurated a 24-year commissioning project, Density 2036 to arrange and produce new works annually for flute through 2036.

Chase explores the sound world of the entire family of flutes in her performances. Her bass flute, “Big Bertha,” is taller than she is. Check out her tour of the flute family here.

Holy Liftoff! is a product of that effort. But its origin is happenstance.

The Collaboration

Beginning during the COVID epidemic, Riley began a new collaborative long-distance project. “When I improvised the first 16 bars of The Holy Liftoff, the melody and the chords whispered its name while simultaneously urging me to make drawings of the experience. The drawings had angels and flying creatures and all the energies were rising up into a surrealistic skyscape. This piece could only have been written for Claire Chase.”

Program notes by Jessy Judge discuss the process:

The first written draft of The Holy Liftoff was a series of full-color drawings on paper, made by Riley at his home in Japan. These drawings feature hand-written notation, across multiple pages, of ‘The Holy Liftoff Chorale’ — the four-part flute chorus that opens the piece — with a host of joyous little cartoon characters turning somersaults in the uneven margins. An angel in a cowboy hat does a backflip over the tempo marking. On the fourth page, a robed monk and three civilians are being blasted into space by a radiant, friendly-looking Earth.

Riley made a lot of drawings that weren’t necessarily related to the chorale but were triggered by having written it. In addition to these drawings, Riley started writing fully through-composed sections for an open scoring of eight instruments. He began to send all this material to Chase, who sent back multi-tracked flute recordings, to which Riley responded with more material.

Chase will play a chorale of eight flutes, often simultaneously. All but one will be recorded. Slides will project images of the musical segments that Riley sketched for the work. The exact use of those musical elements is open to interpretation by Chase in every performance.

This edition of Holy Liftoff! has been arranged by Samuel Clay Birmaher with scores for a string quartet to accompany Chase. The players include violinist Sharan Leventhal from Boston, violinist Ji-Yeon Lee with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and violist Erin Pipal and cellist Adrien Zitoun, core players with Present Music and long-term members of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.

Present Music has been known for its eclectic approach to contemporary music. Although a theme is chosen for each concert, the mix of music may be a broad selection of works. Increasingly, the programming has been taking more risks. A program is often dedicated to one challenging, often landmark event. This has led to a remarkable series of memorable evenings. This concert, with one featured performer and only one composition, fits that pattern. Milwaukee will be only the fourth venue for Holy Liftoff! and the first not on either coast.

The concert begins at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 31 in Windhover Hall at the Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 N. Art Museum Dr. Tickets may be purchased online or at the door. Livestreaming is also available. Discounts are available with a season ticket purchase.

A concert ticket also grants full access to the Milwaukee Art Museum for the day. Museum staff recommends two exhibitions that may be of interest: Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History, featuring nearly 40 monumental drawings, sculptures, and videos created by the artist over the past decade that reflect on the construction of symbols of power and authority and Currents 39: LaToya M. Hobbs, Carving Out Time, a series of contemporary block prints. A pre-concert talk on these exhibits will be offered at 6:30 p.m. in the museum’s Lubar Auditorium.

Concert for Peace

On Sunday, Nov. 24, Present Music returns to Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist for a Concert for Peace. A popular Milwaukee tradition, this concert has celebrated community, gratitude and thanksgiving for many decades.

MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ winner Courtney Bryan’s Sanctum headlines this annual Thanksgiving concert — a powerful piece infused with gospel influences and a call for unity against brutality. Michael Kropf’s moving violin concerto, “Moses in Nederland,” featuring Sabrina Tabby, echoes Yiddish tunes and poetry from Nazi-occupied Holland.

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