Words in Motion
Lakewood Memorial Chapel
Sept 8, 2024
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MUSICIANS
Special Guest Narrator Brent Michael Davids (Mohican/Munsee-Lenape) is an internationally celebrated composer of nearly five decades, a music warrior for native equity and parity, and our most seasoned Indigenous composer. A citizen of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, Davids is co-director of the Lenape Center in Manhattan. He created and co-founded Arizona’s renowned Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP), championing indigenous youth to compose written music. He designs instruments and pens performable notations that are themselves visual works of art. As an American Indian Music Specialist, Davids is in demand as composer, educator and consultant for film, television, universities and festivals. With myriad awards and commissions, the Venice Biennale Musica 2022 featured Davids on a concert he co-curated with a specially commissioned work. In 2015, Indian Summer Festival awarded Davids its “Lifetime Achievement Award.” Davids holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Music Composition from Northern Illinois University (1981) and Arizona State University (1992) respectively, trained at Redford’s Sundance Institute, and apprenticed with film composer Stephen Warbeck (Shakespeare In Love). He has garnered the Distinguished Alumni Awards from both of the universities he attended, NIU (1996) and ASU (2004), and is repeatedly commissioned by the nation’s most celebrated ensembles, such as the National Symphony Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, Chanticleer, and the Joffrey Ballet. www.filmcomposer.us
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Elwyn A Fraser Jr is a 4.5 octave-range singer-songwriter coupling heart-steeped lyrics with diverse cinematic sounds. His well-seasoned background spans award-winning ensembles from Sounds of Blackness to Minnesota Chorale. Elwyn has lent his voice to thousands across venues spanning from Ireland to London and from Orchestra Hall to Carnegie Hall.
Critics and professional artists alike have described his creative gravitas as “powerful”, “extraordinary”, “brilliant”, “amazing”, “atmosphere changing”, and “wow”. He finds dynamic music and empathic narration to be a universal language to the heart. Elwyn desires to tear down divides and uplift souls on their journey to greater purpose in life and healthy fellowship with humankind.
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Joseph Trucano is a Minneapolis based performer. Joe serves as the Organist & Ensemble Director at Westminster Presbyterian Church and is the Artistic Director of Skål Chamber Collective. Prior to this, he was the Associate Producer of American Public Media's nationally broadcast Pipedreams program, and curator of Minnesota Public Radio's Pop Up Classical series.
As a performer, Joe has performed for multiple live radio appearances as soloist and collaborator, was a 2016-2017 MPR Class Notes Artist, and is an active performer, conductor, and teacher within the Twin Cities and internationally. Local engagements have included appearances with the Schubert Club, Minnesota Public Radio, Park Square Theater, VocalPoint Chorus, Justice Choir, Minneapolis Fringe Festival, and Twin Cities American Guild of Organists.
Joe holds a Master's of Music Degree in Organ Performance & Literature from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY where he was the recipient of the James B. Cochran award for excellence in performance. Prior to that, he attended Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota where he studied organ, cello and conducting and was the first student in Concordia's history to be awarded the prestigious Senior Honors award and orchestral appearance on two instruments (cello and organ).
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Elizabeth York lives in St. Paul, MN, and is sought after as a performer and teacher across the region. She currently holds the positions of Associate Concertmaster and Personnel Manager of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, and joins the faculty at Gustavus Adolphus College in Fall 2024. Elizabeth is an avid chamber musician and recitalist with interest in a wide range of musical styles, from baroque performance practice to contemporary music. She was a 2023-24 MPR Classnotes artist as a member of the Ninebark Ensemble. Selected recent performance highlights include Apollo Chamber Music Festival, 10th Wave Chamber Music Collective, MacPhail Spotlight series, and Montana Chamber Music Summer Festival. Elizabeth has been featured as a soloist with the SDSO and Birch Creek Symphony in recent seasons.
In 2013 Elizabeth completed a dual Doctor of Musical Arts in violin and viola performance at Stony Brook University (NY). Previously, she completed a MM at Stony Brook University and BM from East Carolina University in violin performance. Her major teachers include violinists Ara Gregorian, Soovin Kim, and Phil Setzer, violists Dan Panner, Nicholas Cords, and Lawrence Dutton, and chamber music studies with the Emerson String Quartet. www.elizabeth-york.com
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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.
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Patricia Ryan, an avid chamber musician, has performed with some of the world's leading chamber musicians in her career, including pianist Emanuel Ax, the Pacifica String Quartet, violinists Geoff Nuttall, Ian Swensen, Axel Strauss, Wei He, Bettina Mussumeli, violists John Largess, Ivo-Jan van der Werff, Jodi Levitz, Ashleigh Gordon, Peter Slowik, Steve Dann, Max Mandel, and cellists Norman Fischer, Jean-Michel Fonteneau, David Geber, Anthony Elliott, and Natasha Brofsky.
From 2017-2024, Ms. Ryan was the cellist of the Artaria String Quartet based in St. Paul, Minnesota. As a member, she was on the faculty of the Artaria Chamber Music School, Stringwood Chamber Music Festival and assisted at the Saint Paul String Quartet Competition.
A multifaceted musician, Ms. Ryan is actively involved in a wide range of groups, including the conductorless string ensemble KINETIC, contemporary music ensemble 10th Wave Chamber Music Collective, and the genre-bending ensemble, Delphia Cello Quartet.
A passionate teacher, Ms. Ryan on faculty at Walker|West Music Academy, serving the Twin Cities area. She currently has openings in her studio and offers 30 minute, 45 minute, and 1 hour lessons.
Ms. Ryan performs on a 1976 Gio Batta Morassi cello and a 1988 Roger Zabinski bow. www.patriciaryancello.com
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Eri Isomura is a percussionist and marimbist from St. Paul. Eri is a founding member of 10th Wave. She has recently performed in a variety of musical styles with the Minnesota Opera, Duluth Symphony, Theater Mu, Cantus, National Lutheran Choir, Zeitgeist, Border CrosSing and others. Recording projects include the album "Twelve Months in Minnesota" (2023) consisting of percussion solos composed by Asuka Kakitani, "Musical Moments for Cello and Marimba" (2021) with her father Sachiya Isomura, a former cellist in the Minnesota Orchestra, "Champagne Confetti" self-titled pop classical album(2023), among others.
As an educator, Eri was percussion faculty at St. Olaf College from 2018-2023, and a percussion class teacher at Yinghua Academy, and President of the Percussive Arts Society Minnesota Chapter. She has been a clinician at the Minnesota Percussion Association, MacPhail Center of Arts, among others.
Eri’s teachers include Robert Adney; David Hagedorn and Phil Hey at St. Olaf College, where she received her B.M. in Percussion Performance with Distinction in 2011; and Keith Aleo, Doug Perkins, Samuel Z Solomon, and Nancy Zeltsman at the Boston Conservatory where she completed her M.M. in Percussion Performance.
Eri is endorsed by Koide Cymbals and Innovative Percussion. eriisomura.com
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Angela Maria Lara Cabrera
Angela Lara is a Colombian percussionist, recognized by her versatility and musicianship among classical and latin percussion. Graduated from the National Conservatory of Colombia, she has performed in the most emblematic theaters in Europe acting as principal percussionist of the Young Philharmonic of Colombia. She was double winner at the Young Soloists Concerts Series in Colombia, invited soloist of the Texas Christian University Symphony Orchestra and winner of the Musicians Club of Women competition held in Chicago. Currently, she is pursuing a Master Degree in Percussion Performance at the University of Minnesota and working on new percussion repertoire based on Colombian traditions.
COMPOSERS
Michael Maiorana
Michael Maiorana is a composer in Minneapolis who enjoys finding inspiration in nature, science, and art. After graduating from Grinnell College in rural Iowa, he studied composition, harmony, and counterpoint at the European American Musical Alliance in Paris. Some of his recent projects include a 30 minute live remote choral piece setting a speech by WPA director Harry Hopkins, a 20 minute wind quintet inspired by paintings of trees, and a set of short pieces for bass guitar, loop pedal, and video.
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James Rolfe
Toronto composer James Rolfe has been commissioned and performed by ensembles, orchestras, choirs, theatres, and opera companies in Canada, the USA, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the K. M. Hunter Music Award, the Louis Applebaum Composers Award, the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music, Choral Canada’s Outstanding Choral Work Award, and the Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prize. He holds composition degrees from Princeton University and from the University of Toronto, where he now serves as a composition instructor. He also works as a composer mentor.
Rolfe’s operas have been performed in Toronto, Halifax, Vancouver, Banff, Edmonton, and New York. Beatrice Chancy (1998, with librettist George Elliott Clarke) played to sold-out houses and rave reviews; The Overcoat (2018, with librettist and director Morris Panych) was premiered by Tapestry Opera with Canadian Stage and Vancouver Opera, and nominated for 10 Dora Awards. Among his other collaborators are writers André Alexis, Anna Chatterton, Luke Hathaway, Steven Heighton, Camyar Chai, Alex Poch-Goldin, Dennis Lee, and Sophie Herxheimer, and choreographer James Kudelka. His solo CDs raW (2011) and Breathe (2017, nominated for a JUNO Award) are available on Centrediscs; Wound Turned to Light (2023, a songbook setting contemporary Canadian poets) is available on Redshift Records. https://www.jamesrolfe.ca/
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Vivian Fung
JUNO Award-winning composer Vivian Fung has a unique talent for combining idiosyncratic textures and styles into large-scale works, reflecting her multicultural background. NPR calls her “one of today’s most eclectic composers” and The Philadelphia Inquirer praises her “stunningly original compositional voice.”
Recent and upcoming highlights include international performances of Prayer, her critically acclaimed elegy for the pandemic; the digital world premiere of two operatic scenes based on Fung’s oral family history in Cambodia with librettist Royce Vavrek; a new project about identity with Vavrek and soprano Andrea Nunez; percussion works for Network for New Music and Ensemble for These Times; and a commission from Cape Cod Chamber Music Society.
Born in Edmonton, Canada, Fung received her doctorate from The Juilliard School and currently lives in California. Learn more at www.vivianfung.ca.
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Brent Michael Davids (Mohican/Munsee-Lenape) is an internationally celebrated composer of nearly five decades, a music warrior for native equity and parity, and our most seasoned Indigenous composer. A citizen of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, Davids is co-director of the Lenape Center in Manhattan. He created and co-founded Arizona’s renowned Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP), championing indigenous youth to compose written music. He designs instruments and pens performable notations that are themselves visual works of art. As an American Indian Music Specialist, Davids is in demand as composer, educator and consultant for film, television, universities and festivals. With myriad awards and commissions, the Venice Biennale Musica 2022 featured Davids on a concert he co-curated with a specially commissioned work. In 2015, Indian Summer Festival awarded Davids its “Lifetime Achievement Award.” Davids holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Music Composition from Northern Illinois University (1981) and Arizona State University (1992) respectively, trained at Redford’s Sundance Institute, and apprenticed with film composer Stephen Warbeck (Shakespeare In Love). He has garnered the Distinguished Alumni Awards from both of the universities he attended, NIU (1996) and ASU (2004), and is repeatedly commissioned by the nation’s most celebrated ensembles, such as the National Symphony Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, Chanticleer, and the Joffrey Ballet. www.filmcomposer.us
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PROGRAM NOTES
Billy Collins Suite by Vivian Fung/Text by Billy Collins (1941- )
Vivian Fung’s Collins trilogy uses explicit tone painting to create miniature comedy-dramas. The distinctive timbre of the clarinet is featured to make points and create moods...Fung’s work is a three-act playlet in sound, akin to the words-and-music genre pioneered by Stravinsky in L’Histoire du Soldat. Narrator and instruments are closely integrated in “Insomnia” — not an obvious topic for humor, but Collins brings inevitable smiles with his image of the frenetic tricycle-rider. Repeated tremolo-like figures for the instruments represent the agitation and futility of the sleepless speaker; the soft dynamic is a touch of irony, since the insomniac’s brain is shouting. A short clarinet passage of quarter notes and staccato eighth notes evokes pacing the floor. With dramatic glissandos, clarinet and cello suddenly scream frustration. Then low piano octaves support the narrator again, while its chords underpin a virtuosic clarinet-cello dialogue. Fung suddenly changes gears, with very soft lightly-sketched patterns — the cellist playing in an unusually high register — as the speaker begins to hope he will at last find rest. And indeed, cello harmonics, a sustained clarinet tone, and a high keyboard postscript appear to bring repose.
Billy Collins, former U.S. poet laureate, has been hailed as the first American poet since Robert Frost to garner great critical acclaim and broad popular appeal in equal measure. "His poems generate surprise, inviting the reader to anticipate each new one as if it might be the best one yet" (World Literature Today). In Collins's poetry, "even the most commonplace things never turn out quite the way you think they will" (Newsweek).
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The Fire by Michael Maiorana/Poem by Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
The work was written for 10th Wave as a project featured in the New Music Gathering conference in the summer of 2022, which had a theme of “Money?” for the performances of the event. Irish-American poet Lola Ridge had written a work depicting the labor rights abuses of the early 20th century, relentlessly expressing the harm of short term profits over long term/personal costs through intense allegories. Maiorana saw this connection and set the text to conflicting and impactful harmonies to match the tension of the narrative.
The instrumentation you will hear this afternoon of The Fire is a new arrangement completed July 2024 for the occasion. Thanks Michael!
The Connection by James Rolfe/Text by Daniil Kharms (1905-1942)
The quirky and absurd short story “The Connection” is paired with solo marimba, a large keyboard instrument, performed with two mallets in each hand. The composer intends for the work to be narrated and performed simultaneously by one marimbist, and can be done “affectionately, ironically, deadpan, childlike, for example, or combinations of the above.”
Daniil Kharms was an early Soviet-era Russian avant-gardist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. The Connection is one of many of his children’s stories that he created through the span of his life. His loyal friends hid and preserved his writings and ultimately survived his early death during the siege of Leningrad in 1942. His writings are widely known and set to music in opera, classical, and even paid homage through rap music.
The Last of James Fenimore Cooper (2001) by Brent Michael Davids
A humorous narrated story with instrumental ensemble commenting on James Fenimore Cooper’s erroneous “Last of the Mohicans” book. Originally commissioned for the Miró Quartet by the Caramoor International Music Festival for A String Quartet Library for the 21st Century, and also premiered by the Zeitgeist ensemble.​​​​
WHAT DID YOU THINK OF "WORDS IN MOTION"?
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