"Three Places" Virtual Concert

Concert details: Live on Youtube (archive available after performance), June 25th 2021 7pm CDT. 

Zeitgeist Quartet is the fiscal sponsor of 10th Wave, helping all donations become tax-deductible.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Three Places is a set of pieces inspired by Point Pelee in Canada, a redwood forest in California, and a beach on Lake Huron in Michigan.  It will be performed live over the internet, with each performer in their own home, connected over Zoom for the video and Cleanfeed for the audio.  

The music is written specifically for this medium of live remote music, with all of the musical elements fully embracing the constraints and strengths of internet-connected performance.  The pieces are all place-based, in part from a desire to be other places this past winter, and in part to center the performers and audience in a single place together.  

There are three locations - 

Point Pelee is a national park in Canada, the southernmost tip of the mainland, and it juts out into Lake Erie.  We would visit almost every winter, and the beach and water was always so different from year to year, some years with massive ice buildup, others with high winds, some years very calm and gentle.  The two movements are based on more recent trips there in 2011 and 2016.  

Caseville is a town in the tip-of-the-thumb on Lake Huron in Michigan, where we would rent a cabin for a week in the summer.  There are three movements from there - drip castles, dunes, and minnows, all evocations of childhood memories.

Redwood Regional Park is a place I’ve only visited once, but reading about it afterwards, I learned there’s a single old-growth tree that survived two rounds of logging in the 19th and early 20th century.  It’s the only old-growth tree left in the area, and I wanted to write a piece about that.  

Program notes for Old Survivor, the piece based on Redwood Regional Park:

Old Survivor is the name of a tree in Dr. Aurelia Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park, in Oakland, California. The tree is about 470 years old, and it's the last remaining old growth tree in the Oakland Hills. The area was logged heavily from 1845-1860, then again from 1906 until 1916, when the park was purchased by Oakland to preserve the remaining redwoods.  This piece is from the perspective of Old Survivor, embodied in the solo bass, with the rest of the ensemble in the background as the forest.  

ABOUT THE COMPOSER

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.

Michael has participated in Minneapolis/St. Paul composition workshops including VocalEssence Remix, Magpies & Ravens Lineage and the Nautilus Composer-Librettist Studio, and has attended the Lehigh University Choral Composition Forum and the University of Missouri Kansas City Composition Workshop. His music has been performed by such ensembles as Lumina, newEar, Zeitgeist, 10th Wave, the Princeton Singers and andPlay. Michael is a member of the American Composers Forum and ASCAP. More information and music at www.maioranamusic.com.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

See 10th Wave musician bios at 10thwave.org.