​Our bags are packed, rehearsals done and repertoire refined, and all of the travel and production details under control. Zeitgeist is on its way to Cleveland, to perform three concerts with the No Exit New Music Ensemble as part of our Here and There touring partnership. It’s been nearly a year since our last visit, and we’re eager to connect with our audience in Cleveland once again.
 
Zeitgeist is based in Saint Paul, and we’re passionate about investing our artistry and resources in the artists and audiences that make up our local new music community. I love creating and presenting work from composers in my own community. The music we create together makes a statement – “THIS IS WHERE WE ARE” and “THIS IS WHAT WE ARE!” And when we tour, we get the opportunity to bring these Minnesota musical statements throughout the nation.  
 
However, our partnership with No Exit New Music Ensemble let’s us do even more. As we tour back and forth, both ensembles develop relationships with artists and audiences in both communities. This weekend, as we play music by Cleveland composers Tim Beyer and James Praznik alongside works by Twin Cities composers Carei Thomas, Janika Vandervelde, Pat O’Keefe, and Greg Theisen, we get to reach out and make a very different statement - “SO, THIS IS WHERE YOU ARE” and “SO, THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE”.
 
It’s going to be quite a discovery!

--Heather Barringer, Zeitgeist
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​Jan. 13  •  7:30 p.m.
Euclid Tavern
11625 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106 

​Program includes: ​​
Kite Sites - Gregory Theisen
This World is Maya -  Janika Vandervelde
Shtetl - Timothy Beyer
Shadows of the Electric Moon - Per Bloland
Black - Mark Mellits
Streams - Ann Millikan

Jan. 14  •  8 p.m.
Heights Arts Gallery Concert
2175 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights, OH 44118

​Program includes: 
Metaphysics of Notation - Mark Applebaum
Snellie, Sound Town I & II - Carei Thomas
Hello Cleveland - Pat O'Keefe
This World is Maya -  Janika Vandervelde
Almost a New Man - James Praznik
Shtetl - Timothy Beyer
Streams - Ann Millikan​

Jan. 15  •  12-5 p.m.
SPACES Gallery
2900 Detroit Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44113
​
​FREE for All: SPACES Grand Opening Open House with light refreshments, tours of the new SPACES Gallery, and drop-in performances by Zeitgeist and No Exit. 

Could you give a brief synopsis of Mother King?

Mother King  (MK) is a three act opera; it tells the story of Alberta Williams King who most people will recognize as the mother of Martin Luther King, Jr. We meet Alberta on the day that she is assassinated sitting at the organ at her home church of Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta, GA but she is in between time and the timelessness, between heaven and earth, she is still flesh but is mostly spirit. The storytelling is nonlinear magical realism, Alberta embodies the leadership and inspiration of Black women. The audience witnesses her journey through Black birth, Black resilience, and Black joy. There are threads in terms of themes which comes through in Venessa Fuentes' poetry.

You wrote on your Facebook page that you use art “as a means to promote social consciousness.” What specifically are you promoting in Mother King?

One of the things I feel responsible for as an artist is lifting up stories that are not being heard, helping to magnify these stories through my own artistic creation is a way I feel I can promote social consciousness. Stories of people of color, especial women of color are the narratives not typically found in classical music. With Mother King, Venessa and I saw an opportunity to use opera to lift up the women of the Civil Rights movement. We had both seen Ava Duvenay's Selma and love the movie but we both felt that the voices of Black Women were written into the background of the story which happens too often. Through MK we are promoting the strength, beauty and power of Black women.

What kind of audience are you aiming to reach with Mother King?

With Mother King, I am aiming to reach those who truly desire to learn more about the richness of Black history and culture. I am also interested in new opera goes, those who may not see opera as representative of their own culture and narratives.

You have a wide range of musical influences, from Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis to Debussy and Satie. How have these and other musicians/composers influenced Mother King? What are some specific elements stemming from these influences that listeners can hear in the opera?

I am not sure if you will be able to hear the influences from the artists I listed in my list of influences. I certainly am influenced by serialist composers,  I love the phrasing of Miles Davis' solos, the space he uses between the notes and the extended tonality. Certainly, I was inspired by the lyrical impressionism of Claude Debussy and his use of nontraditional scales, and the beautiful melancholy minimalism of Erik Satie... but what would you hear of these influences in Mother King. It's very difficult to say. I think the 15/16 and 17/16 alternating measures, I intended to demonstrate jazz phrasing in a new way as well as introduce a "skipping" technique which would be and influence from hip hop producer J Dilla. I had been fascinated with his style and familiar made unfamiliar by introducing a little microstep to the beat by focusing on the 16th note as a base, I can add steps in and take steps out to create space where a familiar rhythm or phrase sounds slightly off adding to the nonlinear magical realist storytelling. Everything is slightly out of sorts. I started out composing the music for MK in a very stylized, derivative way and found myself becoming more of an imitator than a composer. This wasn't working for me; I decided not to use period music and create serial clusters and motifs and built harmonic and melodic foundations from those.

Interview conducted by ​Evie Werger.

​Dec. 15, 2016  •  6 p.m. music, 5:30 p.m. doors
Studio Z: 275 East Fourth Street, Suite 200, St. Paul
Tickets: $10  •  Tickets & Info

Lowertown Listening Sessions invite curious listeners to enjoy adventurous sounds and insightful conversation with the music-makers of our time. Held at Studio Z, Zeitgeist’s performance space in Lowertown St. Paul, this monthly happy hour series brings guest artists from all genres of new music (jazz, classical, world music, folk, and more) for performances and informal discussion in an after-work setting with food and beverages from Lowertown eateries. ​

​Guitarist Jim Falbo returns to Studio Z this Friday, Nov. 4 to celebrate the release of his new album, Guitar Reveries. Jim chatted with us about the new album his eclectic influences as a performer and composer. 

Tell us about your latest album, Guitar Reveries.

I wanted to make an album that had as diverse a mix of music from my repertoire as possible. Through years of performing concerts, and many different types of gigs (particularly weddings), I have found the pieces on this album to be very popular with audiences. It's always surprising how great musical minds will come up to me at gigs and mention pieces I have just played with comments like: "I loved the Spanish Dance, and Asturias" or "can you play La Vie en Rose again?" Our community in Minnesota is musically savvy. 

I wanted to also record pieces that people are not particularly familiar with to open up musical boundaries for my audiences. Pieces from Brazilian guitarists Dilermando Reis, and Baden Powell come to mind. The combination of Spanish, Brazilian, and contemporary pieces on one album is particularly interesting to me, especially when you consider the differences and similarities in the musical forms and time frame they were created in.

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What inspires the eclectic, multi-genre variety of the album and your work in general. 

I guess I get tired of playing the same thing over and over. I actually started out playing electric guitar twenty some odd years ago, and have played so many different styles of music since then--it's really incredible. For example, I taught myself the art of fingerstyle steel string guitar by applying everything I had learned through classical guitar several years ago. I am always changing my style up to keep myself engaged with the music. I find that audiences also react positively and can be entertained at a different level when pieces that are so different are played back to back. I am always trying to expand my repertoire for concerts and private events, because it also means I will have a better chance of getting hired if I can appeal to as many people as possible. Keeping audiences on their toes is important and it becomes easier with an eclectic range of music.


What are your influences in your writing, and how does your work as a composer influence your guitar performance? 

I am a romantic at heart. I got into music wanting to become a pianist from my love of piano great Frederic Chopin. The music of Paraguayan guitarist Agustin Barrios was similar to Chopin's in romantic expression and virtuosity, and my love for Barrios' music led me on my journey to classical guitar and beyond. The past several years I have grown a deep appreciation and understanding of other South American music as well. 
​
I guess you don't really think about what your outcome is going to be when writing music, as your influences mesh together like DNA to form "musical offspring." With that said, I don't write very easy music for the guitar, and am always surprised at how difficult I make things for myself. As a result, I have to make sure my musical chops are in order to execute pieces of music I write.

Is there a Vol. 2 in the works? How would that album differ from Vol. 1?
It's definitely in the queue. There are about four projects that I want to record right now. Given the skyrocketing sales and highly lucrative jazz recording industry in general, these should be done in like six weeks. Ok I'm kidding; even if I was Keith Jarrett, four projects would be pretty unrealistic in the short term. So basically I'm going to try to write a lot of music between mid-November and the end of the year. Depending on what direction that music takes, we may record this group again next year. I'm sure it will differ from Vol. 1, but at this point I'm not making a conscious effort to preconceive the next album as any particular "thing". I want to see how the sound of the group develops and build around that.

Tell us about your connection to Minnesota. Has that had any influence on your work?
I'm from New Richmond, Wisconsin and have a lot of family in the Twin Cities. I haven't composed anything specifically built around Wisconsin or Minnesota themes yet (Maria Schneider has set kind of a high bar there!). But there are so many great jazz artists in the Twin Cities area that I'd say just being around such a vital jazz community had a very strong effect on how I hear, play and compose music. It was a treat to be able to hear music at the old Dakota and the Artists' Quarter. I was also really fortunate to be able to take lessons with Phil Hey. Phil, as everyone should already know, is a musical genius. He's also the one who told me the first 50 or so jazz recordings I should check out. So definitely blame him if you don't like the way I play. Basically within the US there are only a handful of real "communities" of jazz musicians. The Twin Cities area has one of the strongest creative music scenes in the country and anyone who studies jazz in the area is lucky to have so many masterful artists from whom to learn.

NextNotes Lab is an offshoot of the flagship NextNotes® High School Composition Awards program via the American Composers Forum​. Now in its third season, NextNotes is a national program designed to nurture the next generation of creative voices in music composition - in any genre. Students in grades 9-12 are invited to apply with a single composition in any genre or style. Whereas NextNotes is nationwide, NextNotes Lab focuses on the Twin Cities community of young composers.

Seeing the surprising number of high-school-aged composers in the area, composer Austin Kraft decided they should collaborate, and so founded this student-run composer ensemble. (And he somehow managed to do this while swamped with the average high-school-student workload.)  Austin says, “My driving idea behind the creation of the Lab is that someone who has written a composition has the right to hear real people perform it. As a composer who has had great opportunities to hear my music performed and to receive insightful feedback from other composers, I felt indebted to the local creative community. NextNotes Lab provides a non-competitive space for all young composers to experiment and to take ownership of their art.”

A typical meeting for NextNotes Lab takes place at a member’s house. Makeshift music stands (i.e. decorative plate holders) are often devised. During the meetings, composers present revised drafts of compositions and receive feedback on notation and style. Ted Moore, a Twin Cities composer, offers great on-call mentorship at numerous Lab meetings. Beyond performing and discussing their compositions, they use the meeting times to figure out future logistics. The Lab prides itself on being largely self-sustaining: all composers and performers are teenagers.

The NextNotes Lab composers are excited to present their inaugural concert featuring pieces by Nicholas Christenson, Seamus Hubbard Flynn, Austin Kraft and Maxwell Rader. They’ll also be joined by peer high school musicians Duncan Henry and Madeline Pape. Pieces on the program feature combinations of the following instrumentation: flute, bassoon, saxophone, horn, violin, percussion, harp, piano, and electronics. Please join them!

For more information on the NextNotes Lab, visit www.composersforum.org/program/nextnotes-lab, and for complete information about NextNotes High School Composition Awards, visit www.nextnotes.org.

Charlie McCarron (of Composer Quest fame) got together with humorist Kevin Kling and composer Victor Zupanc to chat about the creation of For the Birds, an evening-length chamber work featuring Zeitgeist that is set to release on CD Sept. 8, 2016. Click play to listen to the full interview, or read the transcript below. Then, order your copy of the album or join Kevin, Victor, and Zeitgeist for the CD release concert September 8-10 at Studio Z. 

Charlie McCarron (CM): Kevin Kling and Victor Zupanc, thanks for being here. I’m looking forward to chatting a little bit about the Zeitgeist For the Birds release. Maybe, Kevin, you could talk about where the poems came from and the concept for the project.

Kevin Kling (KK): Sure. I wrote the poems in the hospital on morphine, because I’d just been in a motorcycle accident, and my room seemed to keep filling up with birds (that I found out later weren’t really there). And so I started writing poems about the different birds. And I wasn’t a poet before the accident, and so that was interesting to me as much as the birds. I was like, okay, here they go. So I wrote a series of poems based on the birds, and Victor and I are always scheming on stuff to work on. He said, “What do you got, what do you got?”, and…

Victor Zupanc (VZ): [interrupts] I just remember getting a stack of them from you, and then when Zeitgeist commissioned me to write something, it was the first thing I thought of. I thought, “I know exactly what I want to do.”

Kevin Kling: It couldn’t have been a better…you couldn’t have found a better group for them. That was just the most amazing…because it is a place that exists between dreaming and reality, and I think Zeitgeist is very comfortable in that land. They really can take us there, take us to what it was like to be in two different worlds at the same time.

CM: Yeah. I mean, I really felt like there was a cool arc over the course of the whole album. It starts out with stories, kind of from your childhood, Kevin, it sounds like.

KK: Mmhm.

CM: I don’t know, I was listening as I was walking down the street outside my parents’ house last night, as the sun was setting, and it just was the perfect mood for that.

VZ: I was just going to say, I mean, you’re mentioning how the stories come from Kevin’s life and his childhood, which also influenced me in styles of some of this music. I’m thinking of one piece in particular, “The Nighthawks,” (the drive-in theater), which I keep calling “The Billy Joel Song.” And you know, that’s my childhood, when I was a kid and a teenager, listening to pop music and Billy Joel.

KK: I love the fact that you’re singing in the music.

VZ: Yeah, me too. I mean, I’m not a real singer, but I felt like I needed to sing these songs, because of our relationship, and I understood these poems. And we’ve worked together enough that I get it, and I thought this is going to come from deep down inside me, too. And it’s not the type of piece that requires a singer, you know. It needs to be someone who can sing these songs in many different ways and tell the story. I enjoyed it a lot.

KK: It couldn’t be better. It’s a theatrical piece, and that’s really…it rides on an emotional and unseen thread that kind of holds this thing together. And that’s how good stories work. Really good stories…you can’t really figure out how they work, but they do, and you know that there’s, that it relies on momentum. It relies on so many different things, and one of the reasons I can tell that that exists in this music is that we’ve done it already umpteen, how many times now, and every time we do it, I hear something new. Every time we do it, I go, “Oh man, where did that come from?” And so the music seems to be living in its own place. And the other thing: since we tour with it, we’re always in different venues. And different venues will highlight different instruments. Like one kind of venue will make another instrument pop that I haven’t really heard come out as much, and all of a sudden hear that thing and go, “What’s that all about?”

And that’s another really interesting thing I know about touring that probably drives musicians crazy, but for me it’s so interesting because it keeps it really different and really alive.

CM: Yeah. Thinking about the ‘birds’ metaphor going throughout the piece, I’m guessing that the meaning has changed a little bit over time as you’ve performed it so many times. Do you find that the bird sections kind of mean different things to you as you go along?

KK: They do for me, every time

VZ: Yeah, I think so.

KK: Yeah, because you can’t stay in the same place, and for sure some of the stories are dealing with a motorcycle accident when it’s fresh, when it’s brand new. And I’m not there anymore, for certain. And so a lot of it, I’m hearing these songs or these stories and this music, and they’re somebody else. So I’ve already moved past that. But the nice thing about the stories in between is I get to be that somebody else. And so the stories are always changing. I’m always trying to crack these guys out, too. I’m always looking for, like a new thing to throw in there. To throw in another monkey wrench.

VZ: Yeah, I mean we know it so well now where we have done it a lot. Dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of times and we know what it is and we know what it’s supposed to do, so we stretch that, and do play with it.

KK: I still can’t wait to do it whenever I see it’s coming up. It’s really a blast.

VZ: It’s also really deep. I mean, people really respond to it in a really deep way. I’ve never done a performance, a piece, really, where the audience afterwards just doesn’t want to leave.

That’s true. They stay and they want to talk to us about it, and they have so much insight, and so much…you know, we were just talking about our, it bringing us back to childhood, and our histories, and people just start talking about stuff like that. You know, about something that happened to them, or this reminded them of this when they were a child, or…

KK: I think the other reason they want to talk is that it’s challenging work. And especially in the different parts of the state that we go to, this is challenging stuff for anywhere, and so we’re always curious. How is this community going to respond to some of this music? And it’s overwhelmingly been positive. I think that’s part of the reason they want to talk about it. Somebody has finally trusted their community to a piece of challenging music, and they’re up for it. And they come up, and they go, “Yeah. We want more of this stuff.”

CM: One piece that I really enjoyed was when you’re kind of writing from the perspective of a mouse being carried off by a hawk.

KK: My mom hates that one!

CM: It’s kind of heartbreaking, but really…was that one that came to you while you were in the hospital?

KK: Oh yeah, definitely. That’s a real hospital experience, because you’re in the claws of the hawk a lot, and you don’t know where you’re going or who you’re being fed to. [Laughs]

CM: Towards the end of the album, it does get a little bit deeper and kind of heavy and dark…

KK: Well that’s another piece of music that I just absolutely adore, because there’s a wonderful momentum to it, and the mouse is trying to stop that momentum but the music won’t let it. Especially with Patrick on that bass clarinet, it’s a driving piece. The mouse doesn’t want it to be driving.

VZ: You know, I got the poems and I immediately started thinking of songs, but there were a couple (and that was one of them) where I just went, “No, this is not a song. This is Kevin telling the story, and just music. I’m just going to shape this music and score this really short story.” But that was fun, because as you said, Kevin, that momentum and that driving is like, “Yep. We’re going somewhere, we’re going somewhere.” And then at the end, it’s like, “We’re not going anywhere.”

KK: No, we’re there! [Laughter]

The inmates at MN State Correctional Facility: Faribault belted loud cheers when they learned that they were about to hear the world premiere of Tom Patterson's String Quartet No. 7. The raucous applause at the conclusion of the piece was no-less enthusiastic, and it represented well how the Mill City String Quartet has felt about the work since that first performance.​

Exploring new works with diverse audiences, especially when written by composers with connections to the Twin Cities, is important to the members of the Mill City String Quartet. They have recently performed pieces by Jocelyn Hagen, Kevin Puts, and Gene Gutchë, and are now excited to bring three of Patterson's pieces to Studio Z. The program includes the 7th quartet, a short, one-movement sketch, and the recently-commissioned String Quartet No. 8.

Tom Patterson is a classically-trained composer and multi-instrumentalist living and working in Minneapolis. He received his PhD in music composition from the University of Minnesota in 2007, and has also extensively studied and performed East African xylophone and Indonesian gamelan music. He has written and performed music for film, dance, and video in addition to concert music.
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You can hear more of Tom's works at SoundCloud, or find Tom's latest CD at CD Baby. 

A dark and delightful evening-length chamber work based on Carlo Collodi's beloved The Adventures of Pinocchio, Pine Eyes is a rich mixture of music and words—a compelling adventure for the imagination that will captivate audiences of all ages. Narrator Nicholas Nelson joins Zeitgeist to create a fantastic tale of transformation and discovery with plenty of the bewitchment, adventure, and heroism so crucial to a good fairy tale.  

Pine Eyes was written by Martin Bresnick for Zeitgeist in 2006, and was commissioned by and premiered at the Walker Art Center. Pine Eyes is part of Bresnick’s body of work, Opere della Musica Povera (Works of a Poor Music). Begun in 1991, these compositions explore themes of poverty, extremity, and loss. Musically and visually, this concern manifests itself in the determination of all three artists to use limited (impoverished) visual and musical resources to create a work of simplicity, depth, and captivating immediacy. On one level, Pine Eyes is a fantastic tale of transformation and discovery with plenty of bewitchment, thievery, adventure, and heroism typical of a good fairy tale. Delving deeper into Martin Bresnick’s treatment of the tale, it is also an exploration of human nature—our capacity for deceit and treachery as well as our capacity for self-sacrifice and unconditional love.  

Pine Eyes by Martin Bresnick
May 20-21, 7:30 p.m
May 22, 2 p.m.
Studio Z: 275 East Fourth Street, Suite 200, Saint Paul
Tickets

Prior to the premiere in 2006, Larry Fuchsberg conducted the following interview with Martin Bresnick about the creation of Pine Eyes. ​

A Story About Achieving Our Own Authentic Humanity
AN INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN BRESNICK
BY LARRY FUCHSBERG, 2006
 
Larry Fuchsberg: Pine Eyes has had a relatively long gestation, hasn’t it?

Martin Bresnick: Yes. I received the original commission from Zeitgeist in ’98. They wanted a piece that was 15 to 20 minutes in duration, and I proposed doing a version of the Pinocchio story, which I’d been thinking about for a while, that would be just a fragment—an opening, with the hope that someone might find it interesting enough that it could be completed. That’s how the first incarnation of the work came to be, using excerpts from my own translation of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio story, which I renamed Pine Eyes (one possible rendering of the name Pinocchio). 

The piece was fun—not exactly a laugh riot, but a sharp revision of the story that carried it far away from the Disney treatment. Zeitgeist and I recorded it, as it then was, for a disc of my music, and we kept on looking for ways to fund the creation of a full-length version. That took a really long time. But now, eight years later, we finally have the evening-length work, with the fortunate addition of visual imagery, which we tried out last year at the Walker.

LF: Why did you make your own translation of Collodi? Were you dissatisfied with existing versions, or was translating a way for you to get closer to the text…?

MB: Both, I think. It wasn’t so much that I was disappointed with previous translations, especially the complete ones, but I was struck by the story, some elements of which have a deeply rooted psychological power that I felt very attracted to. There’s the question of parentage, for example: Who is a true father? In the story, Geppetto isn’t really Pinocchio’s father. Pinocchio doesn’t have a father; he’s just a piece of wood. So the search for a true father, and the finding of someone who, while not the genetic father of this creature, becomes his instructor in how to be human—I was very moved by that, and also by the idea that a creature made of wood could somehow flower into a human being. And then I got interested in the story’s very ambiguous depiction of what it is to be a human being—it’s not always such a great thing! 

What particularly stimulated me, though, was my recollection of Disney’s version of the story, which is quite saccharine—not at all like the story I was reading. So I decided that, since I know Italian, I’d go back to the original and find the Pinocchio story I needed to tell—fundamentally, a story about achieving our own authentic humanity. And that’s a very potent and poignant thing.

LF: I have the sense that this work is unusually important to you.

MB: It goes very deep for me, in some ways that I understand and some that I don’t.

LF: Am I right to think that your feelings for Italy are bound up in the piece?

MB: Very much. I lived in Italy twice, saw puppet shows there, and was struck by their crude and vigorous vitality in the commedia dell’arte tradition. Violence was never far beneath the surface of the ancient, ancient stories that the puppets told. Yet the delight that children took in the fantasy and scariness of those stories was unmistakable. Pinocchio is a prime example. In telling of the metamorphosis of one creature into another, it goes back to Ovid and before, but it also contains the Biblical theme of being swallowed by a fish and the castration fantasy of a growing nose that has to be trimmed back. So the story offers a thousand points of departure, all of them rooted deeply in the way we think about the world. 

Pine Eyes belongs to a series of pieces I call “Opere della Musica Povera,” or Works of a Poor Music. I think of it as the apotheosis of the series. You can tell very profound and very human stories with the simplest and crudest of materials. Collodi’s book is a masterful illustration of this. There’s a Pinocchio site on the Web that claims that Collodi’s is the second most-read book in the world, after the Bible. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but for me there’s no doubt that the book is a kind of central text of life.

LF: One of the antecedents of Works of a Poor Music, if I’m not mistaken, is the arte povera movement in the visual arts, which began in Italy in the ’60s.

MB: Yes, I was fortunate enough to see the arte povera movement unfold at first hand and to know some of the artists when I was there in the ’70s. It left a big impact.

LF: Finally, what role has Zeitgeist played in shaping your piece?

MB: I can’t mention Pine Eyes without mentioning Zeitgeist, and in particular I can’t mention this piece without mentioning Eric Stokes, who was a friend from my early twenties onward and who was a model for me as a composer. He was fearless in going against the prevailing modernist culture of his time. He went his own way, towards a music that, like Ives’s, was open to every potential source of musical meaning. It was Eric who stimulated to think about things in that way. And it was he who introduced me to Zeitgeist.

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.