I am very happy to have been invited by Zeitgeist to play The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar on their Early Music Festival. This is my first time performing a work by Morton Feldman. And it is lucky that the piece even exists. It was written in 1966 in collaboration with performer, Christian Wolff (who has said he's not a guitar player). He performed the piece three times and kept the only copy of the score in his guitar case. The case, with guitar and score inside, was stolen out of his car in 1967. But the piece has been reconstructed using Feldman's incomplete sketch of the work, and a recording of one of Wolff's performances. The piece is quiet and spacious and makes use of the special capabilities of the electric guitar such as volume knob (or pedal) swells and the vibrato bar. 

--Jeff Lambert, guitarist
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Lambert will perform The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar on March 31 and April 1 as part of Zeitgeist's Early Music Festival celebrating the work of Morton Feldman. 

Zeitgeist is preparing for our Early Music Festival featuring the music of Morton Feldman at the end of this month. One night, during my usual 2 a.m. insomnia, I was reading some of Feldman's writings. He relayed a story about his study with Stefan Wolpe. Wolpe, a Marxist, was criticizing Feldman's compositions for being "too esoteric" to connect with "the everyday person on the street". At that, Feldman and Wolpe looked out the window to observe the "everyday man on the street".

6th street below was bare except for the painter Jackson Pollock.

Feldman relayed this story in an effort to communicate to student composers to not make assumptions about what the audience wishes to hear. You may be surprised at who is there.

--Heather Barringer, Zeitgeist percussionist & Executive Director

March 31-April 3  •  Studio Z  •  Tickets/Details

Zeitgeist’s 6th Annual Early Music Festival explores the powerful contributions of our musical pioneers with a celebration of composer Morton Feldman. One of the 20th century’s great visionaries, Feldman’s innovations in music notation and his free-flowing indeterminate music embraced new artistic possibilities and made a lasting impact that continues to shape new music today.

Michael Pisaro, (b. 1961, Buffalo, New York), is a world-renowned composer and guitarist currently teaching at Cal Arts. He received a Grant-to-Artists award by The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and has had works performed in notable festivals in Denmark, Hong Kong, Germany, Austria, England, France, Spain, Brazil, Switzerland, and throughout the United States. He is a member of the Wandelweiser Group, an international group of composers and performers that publishes and records experimental music. Building off of John Cage’s legacy, the group explores the use of silence and indeterminacy, challenging conventional ideas about music making. 

Rather than taking the conventional view of the composer as a creator, Pisaro instead defines a composer as “somebody who changes the sonic situation.” Silence, for Pisaro, is not the absence of sound, because, as he puts it, “sound is going on all the time.” Since we already “live in an orchestral environment,” Pisaro asks himself not “what will I create,” but rather “how will I change the environment.” 

Different weather is divided into five different skies, each suggesting different weather conditions. While most of the skies indicate precise pitches and timings, the second is more open. In addition to flute, strings, and electronics, the piece calls for a performer who utilizes unconventional instruments (such as rice, a fan, a radio, etc.) to perform different activities in each sky. 

In rapport abstrait, two guitarists using ebows must literally build a rapport with one another in order to coordinate their parts, despite a lack of metric notation and having to read from two separate parts (no full score exists). While they initially use a watch, in the end, the two are forced to rely on internal counting alone. 

Pisaro’s harmony series uses an anthological collection of poetry by numerous 20th-century authors.  The poems, however, are not actually set to music, but rather translated as music. Providing only descriptions of duration, number of performers, number of tones, and whether those tones are long or short/different or the same, Pisaro nonetheless preserves the mood and form of the poems in these translations. 

--Joshua Musikanto

​March 22, 2016
2-4 p.m. masterclass • Free
7:30 p.m. concert • $15
Studio Z: 275 East Fourth Street, Suite 200, St. Paul
Tickets/Details

113 Composers Collective presents a concert of works by composer Michael Pisaro featuring members of Strains New Music Ensemble and 113.

A free masterclass will be held Tuesday, March 22, 2 p.m. before the concert at Studio Z.

A public seminar will be held Monday, March 21st at the University of Minnesota School of Music, Ferguson Hall, room 280 at 3:30 p.m.