The Fireside Forum on Foreign Policy series ran for a second time this year. Just like last year, it attracted a small number of people who seemed intensely interested in the topic and who came in with lots of knowledge.
Doug Savage, who organizes the series, said that this year’s forums were different in part because of the election cycle. Last year the forums took place during a presidential election, while this year the series ran in the middle of Obama’s second term.
“It’s a very fluid set of issues, and so you know it’s hard to predict what it will look like next year,” Savage said. “But you know there’s always something that deserves public attention.”
Larry Kress attended the series last year. ”She didn’t change any of my opinions, but she gave me a little better insight,” he said.
Carla Freeman, Tuesday’s speaker, has strong ties to Milwaukee and used to live here for a while. She came because of how much she likes the audience that comes to the Forums and enjoys talking about American relations with China.
“I tried to make a case for why there was a strong logic for us turning toward Asia in American policies,” Freeman said. “But how we had to manage that policy carefully so that it served our interests and didn’t get us involved in some of the complicated flash-points in the region.”
Larry Kress attended the series last year. ”She didn’t change any of my opinions, but she gave me a little better insight,” Kress said.
Carla Freeman, Tuesday’s speaker, has strong ties to Milwaukee and used to live here for a while. She came because of how much she likes the audience that comes to the Forums and enjoys talking about American relations with China.
“I tried to make a case for why there was a strong logic for us turning toward Asia in American policies,” Freeman said. “But how we had to manage that policy carefully so that it served our interests and didn’t get us involved in some of the complicated flash-points in the region.”
Peck music students meet up every other Saturday afternoon in the Peck Music Building’s basement to share, learn and record new music as part of Milwaukee Organized Sound and Instrument Collective. Anyone can write; everyone must play. Five or seven videos of newly composes songs and improv are uploaded on MOSAIC’s YouTube site after each meeting. Founder Sebastian Valenzuela called MOSAIC “a way to get fresh baked music every two weeks.”
“People always go into MOSAIC with a sense of, ‘I don’t know what the hell’s gonna happen,’” Valenzuela said. “And that’s great, because that’s the very nature of the kind of music that we have.”
Similar to the Unruly Music festival, MOSAIC aims to get music makers and audiences to embrace and take contemporary music seriously, instead of clinging to classical. “It’s not always gonna be reading Beethoven or playing Mozart concertos for the rest of your life…,” Valenzuela said. “I think that as an academic environment, it is our responsibility to prepare people for the new real world, the contemporary real world, the here and now.”
“MOSAIC gives us the opportunity to perform music that we wouldn't have the chance to play anywhere else,” said Kim Forsythe, a senior music education major who plays clarinet. “It's exciting to try new things and experiment with different sounds.”
Warren Enstrom, an officer of the Peck composer org, Music from Almost Yesterday, is also an active member of MOSAIC. “The most important thing about composing, whether you're a performer-composer, composer-performer, composer, performer, or even an audience member, is getting new music played so it can be heard,” Enstrom said. “Lots of people dislike so-called ‘new music,’ (specifically referring to art music) but if we can disseminate these works, perhaps someone will find something they like, and perhaps they'll come to a ‘new music’ concert.”
Valenzuela, as a composer and grad student, founded MOSAIC to address a dire creative/social blockage that art schools’ segregated cultures sustain. Within music departments, students have a handful of ensembles they must join and requirements that eat up time, creating an over-structured environment that Valenzuela said prevents many students from interacting with artists outside of their narrow disciplines. “I thought it was also kind of sad how people graduate from college, sometimes not even ever meeting anybody from another side of the music building,” Valenzuela said.
Composers and performers need each other for either to be heard. Valenzuela believes addressing the communicative lack he’s observed is vital for artistic and professional success. It’s unfair if composers don’t know what the heck it’s like for the tuba player or violinist playing their music. At MOSAIC, composers and performers work together and learn different skill sets from each other.
“It’s a great atmosphere there, everyone is very supportive of each other,” Nick Weckman, a MOSAIC performer, said. “Each time I go I am introduced to new ideas with music and ways to experiment with sound that I hadn’t thought of before.”
Amanda Schoofs, Valenzuela’s composition professor last year, told him about a similar group she joined at grad school in California, where student writers and musicians would gather every Thursday to jam, playing new music and improvising. This story, given the frustrating cultural backdrop, sparked Valenzuela’s determination to break academic divisions.
His apartment full of composers, Valenzuela pitched his plan to the other Peck composers before the fall. Valenzuela recalls he and the other composers talked for two to three passionately focused hours on what they wanted to do with MOSAIC. “I got their opinions in on things, and I was glad to find out that they were also on the same page,” Valenzuela said. “They were looking for something like this.” Other composers at the meeting also wanted better communication with performers.
After promoting MOSAIC for a bit, Valenzuela ran the first meeting a couple weeks into the semester. About 15 to 20 people come each meeting, with several newcomers and fifty-some regular members that come when they can.
“Before every MOSAIC meeting, [the other composers] literally go around and pick out performers and tell them, ‘Come on down, you should come to this. I’m gonna be there, other people are gonna there,’” Valenzuela said. “And really, the cool thing about MOSAIC is that everyone in there is already kind of friends…. It’s like we’re all there not just doing something that we love. We’re there having a great time doing it with other friends, and I hope to expand that.”
Vanelzuela wants MOSAIC to keep expanding, even to include Peck students outside the music department, from dance to visual art. “I didn’t want people to think we’re just an ensemble of composers, because I believe there are a lot of people that have the desire to write, and sometimes I feel like labels are so strong, the categories of specialty are so convincing to people, that it actually inhibits them from trying new things.”
“MOSAIC itself doesn't have a rigid structure like most other groups; we're musicians for musicians,” Enstrom said. “If performers want to compose, fantastic! If composers, want to perform, great! We have everyone taking multiple roles in the ensemble, and I think it really brings out the best in everyone.”
Over the weekend, the Helene Zelazo Center featured a collection of five modern dance pieces in the show, FALL(ing). Peck’s dance school decided to rebel from the norm and collaborate with professional dance organizations of Milwaukee on this show, instead of with other Peck departments, said Simone Ferro, chair of the UWM Department of Dance and one of the show’s choreographers.
Peck faculty and students collaborated with professional dancers and choreographers from the Milwaukee Ballet Company and Milwaukee’s Present Music Ensemble. Ferro wanted the three organizations to team up and approached Michael Pink, the director of Milwaukee Ballet, and Kevin Stahlheim, of Present Music, over a year ago about the idea. They were originally going to do a smaller project, but then it evolved into the large production FALL(ing).
“So this started with a microscopic, embryonic version of a small collaboration of one piece between, myself, Present Music and the Milwaukee Ballet and evolved [into] a full evening with four choreographers, professional dancers, student dancers,” said Ferro.
Ferro said that, like much contemporary dance, none of the pieces tried to tell linear narratives. Although this was mostly true, the first piece, “Bird-Prince-Bird,” definitely told a fairly straightforward story about a man and the two women fighting over him.
Ten dance students, choreographed by Petr Zahradnicek of Milwaukee Ballet, performed in the second piece “Fall to Rise.” The main difference that made this piece a little less convincing than the others was how the dancers didn’t have enough conviction with their movement, nor many emotions across their faces (with exception for three dancers given the limelight).
“We all bear gravity, so the idea of FALL(ing) is resisting or not resisting gravity,” Ferro said. The ideas Ferro and those she worked with drew from the spanned from “fall, the season, falling in love, falling [or] dropping, falling as absence of gravity, falling as resistance to gravity.”
Ferro’s choreography for “Dis/Equilibrium” tries to capture the slow motion feeling you get when you fall, when your brain chimes in and is like – whoa, something’s amiss, and time slows down as you try to save yourself. And it really worked. There seemed to be a whole slew of mini-narratives sort of twisted together. It almost was like watching somebody’s life pass before his or her eyes.
“You know when you’re starting to fall, there is a mechanism in your brain that detects that some reason you are not you are in a position that is not customary, and by that time the brain fires impulses to your muscles in time to react,” Ferro said. “But this moment between brain and reaction seems sometimes endless.”
Ferro’s recreation of her 2007 dance “Magnetic Field,” which her notes describe as “the paradox that it makes you stronger to know that you can rely on someone physically and emotionally,” also seemed to have somewhat of a narrative. It seemed to portray a rollercoaster of a relationship.
Peck dance seniors Brenna Marlin and Gina Laurenzi worked on Ferro’s dance number as student researchers through the Office of Undergraduate Research, alongside Peck dance alum Katharina Abderholden, who graduated last spring. They worked for five hours a day, much like professional dancer’s schedules, Ferro said.
“Slowly and Always,” choreographed by Dani Kuepper, was the one piece in which dancers wore color. It would have been distracting if the piece wasn’t so darn good. It had the most movement, the dancers were all happy and the music, which had wowed throughout, sounded celebratory. It was fitting for fall.
Peck dance has gotten more press attention because of this collaboration, Ferro said. “It’s quite exciting to see UWM seen with different lens. Sometimes they say, ‘Oh, this is just and academic institution.’ So there is not the artistic – the artistic side becomes almost clouded, muffled, no?”
Set builders revamped Zelazo for the night. They installed everything from sprung floors to the lighting.
Abderholden, as a movement researcher for Ferro’s “Dis/Equilibrium,” “helped with the choreographic aspects/teaching the dancers how to perform the movement” and rehearsed with the dancers.
“I found it interesting to see how our techniques melded, because I would consider myself a modern dancer…” said Abderholden, who graduated last spring. “There’s an interesting collaboration between techniques and disciplines, because ballet technique is extremely formal, and modern technique is extremely pedestrian, and how the experience of understanding the middle ground and fusing the two together was like, I can’t even describe it, because it was such an involved process of personalities and kind of opening up to resistance and what not.”
Ferro thought having Peck dance students collaborate with professional organizations would also fuel innovation, noting that there’s six or seven dance companies in Milwaukee and this Peck-professional collaboration is only the first.
“The isolation is a dead end,” Ferro said. “So I think the more you promote this overlapping… this symbiotic work, the more you find the strength of this [artistic] community.”
Peck hosted the fall chapter of its biannual Unruly Music Festival this past weekend. The festival featured a set of classical convention-breaking musicians: soprano singer Jamie Jordan, violinist Sarah Plum and the Spektral Quartet. Four select composition students will work with the Spektral Quartet, who will return for spring’s Unruly Music Weekend, to compose a piece the quartet will then perform.
Unruly Music started in 2006, partnering with the Marcus Center in 2009. Students have composed music for the spring each year since its start. Differing from previous years, this fall focuses on Midwest musicians, and spring on local.
“It’s nice to see just how much performing talent there is close to home,” Chris Burns, a composer, Peck composition professor and the Unruly Music director, said.
Burns looks for musicians who, beyond being excellent, charismatic performers, integrate technology into contemporary twists on the classical genre. “It’s classical music, but it’s not classical music,” Burns said. He describes the festival as “boundary breaking” in several ways: its mix of traditional instruments and techy tools, the genre-twist and its blurring of improvised and composed music.
“More than any other classical concerts that happen at the Marcus Center, we’re the ones that are using the microphones and speakers and the laptops,” Burns said.
Spring’s set in April will focus more on improvisational groups like the Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra, as the festival usually does, than the fall set did. “What’s composed and what’s improvised, it doesn’t matter really,” Burns said.
Jamie Jordan started the weekend off Thursday night. As a singer, she uses mainly digital accompaniments in performance, Burns said. These include pre-recorded music and “live-processing” software that composers have designed for her, which basically hears her voice in the microphone and spits out some cool, fitting music.
Plum followed on Friday, playing a violin solo and chamber music, including a piece by Sidney Corbett, who Burns said is a “stellar” American composer barely known in the U.S., but very popular in Europe.
The Spektral Quartet closed the weekend Saturday night. The group performed George Crumb’s “Black Angel,” an anti-war statement that uses shouting, wine glasses and a gong, among other props and theatrical techniques. Listening to the song feels more like watching a play or reading an intense war novel than listening to a quartet.
Clair Sprenger
Staff Writer
A small crowd of about 50 showed up last Thursday night at the Zelazo Center to see Midwestern Charm play in the second installment of MKE Unplugged, a new concert series sponsored by Peck School of the Arts. The audience’s unfortunate size at first seemed like an omen. Lead singer and guitarist/profane poet Conner La Mue refused doom, though, bringing hope back to the scene with horrible (in a good way) humor and serious music.
Dustin DeGolier opened before the main act on a perfectly tuned, nonetheless lackluster (charisma-wise), note. Any music student with eyes or ears could appreciate his precision and expressive and impressive guitar playing. His singing was difficult to appreciate until his last two songs when the (incredible) guitar playing stopped over-powering the vocals. But DeGolier failed to make his opening act come off as anything more than a senior recital. Promising performances, though, always leave infinite room for improvement.
Fast-forward 45 minutes (and, figuratively, a few hypothetical years in DeGolier’s promising career), Midwestern Charm revived the night. La Mue, guitarist Steve Sampson and drummer Ryan Gracyalny played a few songs together at the start and end. Most of the show turned into an unexpected solo act by La Mue. His charming profanity, not-so-sly ad-pitches and charisma made it nothing like a recital. La Mue first hooked the crowd with comedy, and at some unidentifiable point the show got serious. How? It was hard to tell – it just happened. The guy who was on stage cracking jokes about himself and the audience put on this deep, troubled, yet relatable character and poured out a disturbed heart of insecurities through song.
The event did not capture the desired bar-feel that creators Randall Holper and Nicole Schanen described. Instead of having tables and chairs, the room had rows of seats that made the set-up appeared too conventional and concert-y for an event trying to capture the East Side experience. At first this seemed problematic. Once Midwestern Charm loosened the atmosphere, the show captured a more valuable intimacy that La Mue appreciated.
MKE Unplugged tries to give students and community members, especially students not old enough to (legally) get into bars and see local bands perform, a convenient, free bridge into Milwaukee's underrated music scene, according to Schanen, Peck’s marketing specialist. The series runs once a month, Thursday nights 8-10 p.m., giving students a fun alternative to house parties, but still leaving time for the rest of the night. Holper noted that they planned the series to avoid drawing business from bars. Extra funds from the Year of the Arts gave Zelazo chair Holper a chance to finally hold this series, which he'd been planning for four or five years. Holper wanted to connect the Peck music department with all the niches its classical music orientation tends to overlook.
“My goal would be to become a known all-ages venue for people to come see music. And we have 30,000 students. [That’s] a great audience to pull from,” Holper said. “We have song-writing classes; we have history of rock ’n roll classes, but we don’t have any public events that really cater to that crowd... [Students] leave Milwaukee after having been through two, three or four years and just kind of assume that UWM and Milwaukee in general just doesn’t have a very good music scene, because they haven’t been in the clubs where [bands] are.”
Peck junior Christina Mata attended MKE Unplugged for the first time last Thursday night. Mata stood far from alone in her enthusiastic appraise of the show, noting her excitement to see the Directionals in May along with the rest of the series.
“There’s a lot of talent in Milwaukee that isn’t necessarily popular,” Mata said. “It’s good to see local bands playing or getting the attention they deserve.”
“[MKE Unplugged]’s got a killer line-up...” La Mue said. “They like really went after some like really good musicians... that was like enticing for me... I dig their stuff, so I want to be a part of it too.”
The series, though all acoustic this year, features a diverse range of artists. Holper looks forward to seeing how the Sugar Stems, a local pop-rock group, who will put on an acoustic show.
“[We’re] trying to reach a lot of different notes with this series,” Holper said, noting he's open to student suggestions.
“It’s cool that the crowd was more diverse than I thought it would be…” Mata said. “There are people of all ages, basically. It seems to appeal to like a younger crowd, but there are people of all ages.”
Even though there were less people there than Schanen and Holper said were at the last MKE Unplugged concert, and the series still has a ways to go before meeting Holper’s eventual goal of 200-225, Schanen said the event was a success. During the show, audience members literally looked entranced by the music. Everyone that stuck around after the show seemed happy with the experience, including La Mue, who liked MKE Unplugged’s unique, “stripped-down” venue.
“At bars, no one’s paying attention…” La Mue said. “People seemed to be really into [the show] and like come out... that’s all you can ask for for an event.”
Peck celebrates half a century with Year of the Arts
By Clair Sprenger
Staff Writer
[email protected]
UW-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts celebrates the “Year of the Arts” for its 50thanniversary, with more events, cheaper tickets and a message emphasizing art’s importance. Peck will feature about 100 more events this year than its usual 350, collaborating with organizations inside and out of the university, from the Milwaukee Ballet company to UWM’s architecture school.
“Because it’s the Year of the Arts, we’re able to do more [collaborations], and get some of our leaders to think beyond what we usually present,” Peck’s Marketing Director Ellen Schupper said, noting Chancellor Lovell’s supportive role in initiating the year-long celebration.
Schupper says the Year of the Arts has given students more opportunities across every art discipline and allowed staff to experiment with “bigger and bolder” projects Peck wouldn’t necessarily have taken on in years prior.
“[Students] are getting an even greater breath of experience this year,” Schupper said. “We actually had someone post on Facebook something along the lines of what a great year to be a second year at Peck school of the arts—and it’s true.”
UWM acting student Maggie McGwin doesn’t find that the Year of the Arts has opened more doors, but has instilled more pride in the UWM art community.
“As of now, the Year of the Arts celebration hasn’t really proved to be different from any other year in terms of opportunities I’ve had in the theatre department” McGwin said. “I'm in a show that opens in a few weeks, but there is usually a show opening at this time of the semester so it's not really anything unusual.”
“But I actually have begun to feel a sense of pride for being a theatre arts student, which is something I haven’t felt very often at a large public university like UWM,” McGwin said. “…It’s nice to know that Peck is being recognized throughout all of campus this year and I feel proud of the fact that even though I'm not studying business, engineering, or nursing, I’m still hoping to make a difference in the world.”
“Our Peck school students are naturally involved in these events because these events wouldn’t be happening without them,” Schupper said. “…They’re either coming and being in the audience or, more likely, they’re the ones performing in [shows].”
The Year of the Arts isn’t just for hosting events, according to Schupper.
“One of messages that we’re trying to relay is that this is more than just about our events. I mean it’s about celebrating the place of arts in education,” Schupper said. “…We have more events, not just to have more events. We’re doing them to…motivate people to experience the arts in a new way.”
“I guess when I first came back to school this semester, I was pretty surprised to realize that it was the ‘Year of the Arts.’ In my mind, I feel that really every year should be a ‘year of the arts’ when it comes to an art school,” McGwin said.
“The Peck School is the only comprehensive art school in Wisconsin… meaning that we are the are the only school that has all five art disciplines of theater, dance, music, film, and art and design,” Schupper said.
“Not only do [students] get to interact with artists across the spectrum, being at a university they also get to interact with engineers and business students and liberal arts students and so that is the unique experience for our students and…the UWM campus in general… the missions of the university...here—to create opportunities for students to interact with one another and be creative and be innovative across their fields” fit with having Peck at UWM, according to Schupper.
“That’s the biggest and most exciting part about recognizing this Year of the Arts,” McGwin said. “The pride that it brings to an often underrated and overlooked but extremely important part of a large university.”
Peck communications assistant Chelsey Lewis recapped Peck’s 50 year history via email.
Since its start in 1962, Peck has added to its far from humble repertoire, starting with the Fine Arts Quartet – a performance group of Peck music school staff known internationally and in the Milwaukee community, though not so popular among students. In the 1970s it created UWM’s world-renowned film department and went on to build the (also world-renowned) Institute of Visual Arts, A.K.A. Inova – a contemporary art gallery for the visual arts department—in the ’80s. Peck wasn’t “Peck” until 1999, when UWM renamed its School of Fine Arts to recognize the Milton and Lillian Peck Foundation’s donations.
This year has brought new programs, including “MKE Unplugged,” a music program targeting audiences a bit differently than the Quartet. This monthly program features free acoustic performances by local artists, like Trapper Schoepp, whose shows normally cost a fair chunk of your paycheck. Taking place in Zelazo, shows are open to students and the community and include a bar service (with kid beverages for the underage children).
“Since we’re in the Zelazo building, we see students walking form the Kenwood campus over to some of the East Side music and bar establishments. We said, why don’t we give them something they can have right here?” Schupper said. “…So we’re creating the experience people are walking to Downer to get so they can get it right here on campus.”
Only about a hundred people came to the first MKE unplugged performance in September, according to Schupper, who’s hoping for more people to come to the next shows.
“It was a nice sized group for the first one. We’re hoping for a nicer sized [group] for the next one,” Schupper said.
Apart from providing a “polar-opposite” venue setting and music genre to that of the Quartet, according to Schupper, MKE Unplugged’s featured artists are still climbing their way up in the music profession that Quartet members have already summited.
“You have your established artists in the Fine Arts Quartet and then you have your emerging artists for MKE Unplugged,” Schupper said. “…So while we celebrate our students and our student musicians all the time, we wanted to use the Year of the Arts as an opportunity to showcase some of our alumni who have gone on to create bands or groups, or emerging musicians who are in the Milwaukee market.”
Peck’s collaboration with the Milwaukee Ballet and Present Music, a Milwaukee music ensemble/composition group, on the ballet Falling is another “bigger and bolder” event the Year of the Arts will be featured this October in Bader hall. Present music is creating an original score, while choreographers from both the Ballet and Peck are working with a small cast of dancers from both institutions.
“It’s a very fluid kind of choreography experience for our students and the ballet and our choreographers,” Schupper said. “And that’s one of the things about the year of the arts—Not only are we presenting more work, but we’re work that allows our students to interact with professionals in a different way.”
The organizations’ artistic leaders, Michael Pink of the Milwaukee Ballet, Kevin Stalheim of Present Music, and UWM associate dance professor Simone Ferro, asked, “What would it look like to do a dance production focused on falling and that feeling of floating or movement in the air?”
Schupper said, mentioning that the set, which UWM architecture students will design, will somehow suspend dancers. “They’re going to be dancing in the air, for lack of a better description.”
For Peck’s November showing of King Lear – one of Shakespeare’s most intense scripts – theater students are collaborating with the Shakespearean Company from Massachusetts alongside professionals and teachers.
“It’s been about eight years since our faculty and our students have performed side-by-side like this,” Schupper said.
Peck’s cross-discipline collaborations include the Center for Jewish Studies and also the Klezmatics, an internationally celebrated Yiddish-jazz group from New York, to play a free show for students with a valid student ID at UWM in November.
“The relationships that we’ve been able to create or develop more fully because of the Year of the Arts is really part of the story,” Schupper said.
Schupper says Peck hopes lower ticket prices and new events like MKE Unplugged will attract enough students for them to maintain the discount and continue new programming for years after.
