Present Music jamming with dinosaurs
New music, history will mingle at museum
The present and the past will join hands this weekend, when Present Music fills the Milwaukee Public Museum with the sounds of new music.
This unique mingling of new music and history has been in the works for about a year, ever since museum president and CEO Dennis Kois approached Present Music artistic director Kevin Stalheim about the possibly of the ensemble performing in the museum.
“It’s not really typical for natural history museums to do these partnerships,” Kois said, adding that is quite common to see such performances in museums of modern art.
Kois said museum staff members identified exhibits that could be used safely without risking damage. Staffers also participated in the process of designing the performances, which included positioning musicians and coordinating audience flow.
“For better or worse,” Kois said, “this was my idea. We are the largest and the most-attended museum in the state, by a large margin. This is part of our mission of helping support and facilitate other nonprofits.”
Kois said that the Milwaukee Symphony and Danceworks have given performances at the museum in the recent past, but not the sort of in-the-exhibits kind of performance he was envisioning for members of the Present Music Ensemble.
“When I pitched it to Kevin, with the support of someone who is a donor to both of our organizations, he was a little dubious,” he said.
Stalheim said he visited the museum, walking around as any patron might, trying to envision performance spaces and think through “the practicality of moving people around in the museum in a way that would allow them to experience things in a deep way, not just to walk by them.”
It wasn’t until he came back for a walk-through with Kois that Stalheim began to see the potential.
“It was so much fun to go around the museum with him [Kois] and listen to him talk about the museum,” Stalheim said.
It was on the walkabout with Kois that Stalheim realized, “This guy is really going to let me fly – there’s going to be no leash.” Part of Kois’ idea was to position players inside some of the exhibits.
Stalheim, who appreciated saw the possibilities of that immediately, said, “We are going to merge the music and exhibits, sort in the way a movie works.”
In the spirit of that merger, the concert will feature the world premiere of a new work by pianist Cory Smythe, which will include
the amplified, normally inaudible, sounds that plants make as they photosynthesize and grow. Smythe’s piece will be performed in the rain forest exhibit.
Over in Hell Creek, a life-size recreation of one dinosaur feasting on another in prehistoric eastern Montana, audiences will hear “Something to Hunt” by Ashley Fure.
“This is totally an abstract, sound-sculpture type of music,” Stalheim said. “It’s also the one place where we are truly in the exhibit. The musicians will actually be right in there with all the bloody stuff in the exhibit.”
Stalheim hopes that the combination of the seeing the exhibit and hearing the “sound sculpture” piece will makes make both music and setting more powerful to the audience than either would be on it own.
“This is the most complex thing I’ve ever attempted,” Stalheim said of planning this performance.
Stalheim said he visited the museum about 50 times in the past year, as he worked out plans and details for the concert. One of his most memorable moments from those visits helped him define the experience he wanted to create for the audience.
“There was a little girl, maybe 3 years old, walking up some stairs in the museum with her mom,” he recalled. “She was looking down at the stairs until she got to the top. Then she looked up and saw this huge whale-bone structure for the first time.”
He said when the little girl looked up and got her first glimpse of the whalebones, she said “Wow,” with complete wonder. That feeling of wonder is what Stalheim wants to create for the audience.
“Whether people come to the concert as our audience or as a patron of the museum,” he said, “I hope they can be open the experience of hearing sounds they’ve pretty much never heard before.”
Likewise, he said, “He hopes that the segment of the concert that will be performed under the planetarium done will, “transport people into a though-provoking contemplation of the universe.”
The evening’s audience will be divided into four groups, each of which will be guided through the museum during the performance.
The curtain has not yet risen on this Present Music/Milwaukee Public Museum venture, but Stalheim is already looking forward to more collaborations in the future, noting that quite a few exhibits grabbed his imagination for performance possibilities.