 Well, good afternoon. I'm Bob Wilhelm, Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development here at UNL. And I want to thank you for joining us today for the 11th Nebraska lecture this year. This year we've had monthly Nebraska lectures in celebration of our 150th year anniversary. And today's presentation is the final event of this week's research days. We've been having all sorts of different events addressing research and recognizing faculty and staff and our partners in terms of what they're doing. And also we brought in a number of different kinds of speakers. We even were able to schedule our most demanding site visit for a very large project that we're competing for right now to be right in the middle of research. So we had some extra work this week. This is this celebration we've celebrated research, scholarship, creative activities. And it's been really to use this particular Nebraska lecture series to reflect on the accomplishments of the 150 years. So the week that we've had, we've been reflecting on our accomplishments in the last year. But the series has really helped us to look back at 150 years of creative work of research and scholarship at the University of Nebraska. This lecture series is sponsored by the UNL Research Council in cooperation with the Office of the Chancellor, the Office of Research and Economic Development, that's me. And also the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which we know as ALI. And I want to make a special welcome to any, I'm sure there's some ALI members here today. So I'm really glad that you're here with us. We also want to recognize Humanities Nebraska and its Executive Director, Chris Sumerich for helping sponsor this year's lectures. And we've also had special support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has offered more funding for this expanded lecture series with a grant. And we've been able, with this support, we've been able to create podcasts of each of the presentations. And so these presentations are available for people who can't make it today. But they'll also be something that we can preserve over time and people can look back and see what we were talking about during our 150th year. I also want to recognize the University's Research Council, which includes faculty from many different disciplines at Nebraska. The Council really handles all of the heavy lifting in terms of figuring out the program for the Nebraska Lectures. And so they solicit nominations of faculty, and then they make assessments. They choose faculty based on major accomplishments, recent accomplishments, and also the lecturer's ability to explain his or her work. So this selection is very competitive, and it's the highest recognition that the Council bestows on individual faculty members. I want to especially welcome everyone that's joining us via live web stream and through the Facebook Live interface that we have here today. We're going to begin the program soon. I'll introduce our performers today and speakers. And after today's lecture, Ann Marie May, Professor of Economics, will moderate a question and answer session with our performers. I'm sure you want to stay through all of the performance. If you stay a little bit longer, we're also going to have a prize drawing at the end. So there's a special prize. You've got to say to win, but that'll come at the end after we're finished with the question and answer session. And then beyond the question and answers, we'll have a short reception. You can visit with the presenters who I'm about to introduce now. So, so far, the 2019 Nebraska Lectures have reflected on the University and the State from many different perspectives. We've heard about the history of campus architecture, the evolution of Husker School Spirits, the role of the Nebraska's Unicameral, and many others. This is the 11th one we've done so far. Today's lecture we'll explore Nebraska's past and present from yet another vantage point, the composition and performance of music. Unlike many of our previous lectures, Greg Simon's connection to Nebraska just started a few years ago. When he joined the Glencorp School of Music as an assistant professor of composition and jazz studies in 2016. Originally from California, Greg is a jazz trumpeter and a composer whose career is taking him around the country, including Oregon, Colorado, Michigan, many other places. His music has been praised for its high energy, solo turns, and upbeat personality. And his work has been performed by groups around the country. Greg's music draws from a variety of inspirations, including jazz, funk, street art, and Chilean folk song. And its content focuses on heritage and intersection, aiming to create a common space between the communities that it reflects. The thematic focus, that thematic focus made Greg the perfect artist to compose Nebraska's songbook, the first composition that he created entirely in Nebraska. This piece will be performed by two more faculty from the School of Music, soprano Jamie Reimer and pianist Brenda Riston. Jamie, an associate professor of voice, has performed in opera, oratorio, and recital venues across the U.S., Italy, Germany, Brazil, Australia, around the world. She's also a researcher with a focus on contemporary American art song, particularly the life and work of Robert Owens, an African-American composer, pianist, and actor. His work has been published, her work has been published in the Journal of Singing and Pan Pipes, and she lectures frequently around the U.S. and abroad. Brenda Riston, professor of piano and piano pedagogy, is also an accomplished performer and researcher. Her recent performances include the premiere of Nebraska's songbook at the Nebraska Music Teacher Association State Conference and as faculty guest soloist performance with the UNL Symphony Orchestra. Her research focuses on musician occupational health issues, including issues affecting music students at universities, the biomechanics of piano techniques, and the challenges faced by small-handed piano players. She's co-author of a groundbreaking book, Adaptive Strategies for Small-Handed Pianists, and is recipient of the Discoveries and Breakthroughs through Inside Science Award from the Human Factors in Erconomic Society and the American Institute of Physics. So please join me in welcoming Greg, Jamie, and Brenda. Can everybody hear me okay? All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you to Dr. Wilhelm and thank you to the entire team behind the Nebraska lecture series. It's something very special and it's a great honor to be on the stage speaking with you. The Nebraska Songbook is a project that has a long story behind it and represents a lot of things for me, namely community, creativity, and composing song, as you can see on the first slide here. Before we jump in, I want to talk about a little bit of what we're going to talk about for the next half hour. What I'm going to share with you is what I see as the impetus for composing song and the importance of song in documenting story, heritage, community, things that motivate me as a researcher. And to that end, I want to begin by sharing with you, when I sit down to write song, I start by asking myself a couple of core questions, the first of which is why am I actually doing this? What is the goal of composing art song? What value does it have as a method of reflecting or creating a community? Within that, every art song, by definition, is a setting of someone's text, usually not exclusively someone else's text. So how can music enrich poetry? What is it that being a composer of song actually brings to the poetry that the poetry is incapable of creating itself? And by the same token, how can poetry enrich music? Why is it that this particular form is of any value at all? These are questions that we're going to answer over the course of the next half hour together or so. But before we get to that, I do need to tell you a little bit about where I come from and what my story is. Yeah, that's me. My story begins in Livermore, California in 1985 and continues on to Corvallis, Oregon, which was for most of my adolescence that was home for me. Once I graduated, I attended the University of Puget Sound at Tacoma, Washington, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and finally the University of Michigan. And when I arrived in Nebraska to assume my job at the Glencourt School of Music, I had never been to the state before. So it was a brand new experience to come to Nebraska. And as I think any outsider coming to Nebraska would attest to, I had a variety of expectations about what this place was, who its people were, and what it meant to be in Nebraska. And while some of those were in part true, many of them were false. This is not necessarily a postcard. There are elements of it that definitely arise from our history of the Willa Cather image of Nebraska, but there is so much more to it. And around the time that the Nebraska Songbook Project started, I was starting to consider my own identity inside this place as a new Nebraska and what it really meant to me to be here and what it meant to be a creative artist here. And so the Nebraska Songbook was really an effort at the core to figure out the answer to some of those questions. This project was commissioned by the Nebraska Music Teachers Association and written during a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. For those of you who don't know the center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for Arts is in Nebraska City. It's one of the most beautiful places you'll ever see in your life. I highly recommend a visit even if you're not an artist. They've got a tremendous gallery. Some really innovative and creative thinkers are always there in residence and they give terrific artist talks. It's an incredible place to be creative. And between all of these factors, this was right at the beginning of my time in Nebraska. This was commissioned by a Nebraska entity. This was written as part of a residency in Nebraska. And in addition to that, it just so happened that this was the first project that I actually didn't bring with me from my previous stop in Ann Arbor, Michigan in any part. I began the process of sketching, conceiving the entire project right here in Lincoln, which meant that this was going to be my first Nebraska piece. And as such, the goal at the outset was to try to figure out what exactly does that mean for a creative artist? And what is the relationship between location and creation, especially for someone who is trying to reflect an identity to which they are an outsider? The creative community behind this piece is equally as important. While I was at the Kimmel-Harting Nelson Center, I stumbled upon this book, Nebraska Presence. Now, some of you may or may not recognize this book, but this is an anthology of poetry edited by the Backwaters Press out of Omaha by Greg Kosmicki and Mary Stilwell. And earlier on in the process, I had started reading a lot of poetry. I decided at this point that what I really wanted to write was a setting of all Nebraska poets. And I started by looking back in history 150, 125 years. Eventually I got bored. And I decided to look more recent. And I stumbled upon this book, Nebraska Presence, which features exclusively recent, mostly living, but all contemporary Nebraska poets. It is quite a resource. And as soon as I picked it up, I was inspired. I dogeared somewhere between 18 and 20 different poems that are featured in this collection. It really is a tremendous resource for anyone who's interested in what is happening in contemporary poetry in Nebraska. That's where the story begins. But that's not where the story ends. Because as anyone who's ever composed for voice knows that before you actually can write any music, you have to get permission to do so from the poet. And this is a process that quite infamously takes years sometimes and often ends with the word no. And then you're back at the starting point. I got in touch with Greg Kosmicki, who is one of the editors of Nebraska Presence. I explained to him my project. I said, hey, I am interested in writing a setting of some contemporary Nebraska poets. Can you get me in touch with them? And not only was he extremely rapid in his response, I think I heard from him in about 20 minutes after that. But he immediately got me in touch with every single one of the poets that I asked him to. And by the end of the week, I had all the permissions that I needed to begin work on the Nebraska Songbook, which is frankly unconscionable for a composer. That was to me in many ways an indicator that what this project stood for and what my goals for this project were had value in the eyes of the poets that I was interested in working with. And so suddenly I felt the weight of the project a little bit more. And it forced me to really start defining what exactly I wanted this project to do. Question one, what is the goal of composing art song? And here's what I came up with for Nebraska Songbook. First and foremost, I wanted to celebrate the poets in their texts. I wanted to share and magnify those things that I found so striking and so resonant in every single one of those words, even as an outsider to Nebraska. I also wanted to illustrate that at the end of the day, all of these poets were coexisting inside the same universe, the same state, the same ecosystem, the same community. And by the same token, I wanted to explore a Nebraska identity. What does it mean to be a Nebraska? What does it mean to be an outsider who is now a Nebraska? What do these things mean? And of course, because I am a composer, I wanted to create a Nebraska sound world, whatever that meant. And at the time, at the outset of this, this is often the case in the compositional process, I had no idea what the answer was. This was something that I was going to have to figure out. One of the other questions that's not listed up here is what do all of these goals mean for choosing texts? As I mentioned, I had found between 18 and 20 that I that I loved enough to set. Well, an 18 to 20 song song cycle is probably about seven hours worth of music. So I did have to try to triage, at least for this first volume. My ultimate hope is that the Nebraska song book is the first in a series of maybe three or even four different volumes of songs. And I can get around to all of those other texts that I love so dearly. But for now, I chose four. Marilyn Dorf Stonwatch, October by Shirley Butener, the November Hawk by Stephen Barron, and Recent Angels by Kim Tedrow. We will look extensively at what these four texts have to do with each other and what I saw as the common threads between them. But that's as good a starting point as any to answer the second question. How can the poetry enrich the music? That is, when you are looking at music, excuse me, when you are looking at poetry, how can the music fit inside it and magnify certain elements of its expressive energy? And of course, this begins with a lot of analysis. What you're looking at on the screen now is some of the analysis of the text that I did while I was at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. But it is not nearly all of the analysis that I did at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. This is just really at the end of the day an illustration of my process. And that process is itself an endeavor to answer these two questions. What is common to the texts? What do these texts have to do with each other? And by extension, because all of these artists are coming at the question of Nebraska identity, what is common to the Nebraska experience? Many of you probably noticed that as you came in, you were able to grab a one sheet with all of the text in front of you, so feel free to refer as we continue. Here's what I saw as the common areas within the text. Ephemerality. There is an essence in all of these texts of fleetingness, of a sense that everything about the world that the poets are depicting can change and is changing. Of course, this being Nebraska, there's also a strong presence of the natural world. There's a tension between that what we see and what we do not see, especially in the context of that natural world. Stephen Barron's November Hawk does a particularly poignant job, I think, of doing this. And of course, all of these three things summed to me to what I think of as the core thematic energy behind these texts, which is tension between the past and the future of Nebraska. Something I think I would share with you here is Nebraska's three largest counties, Douglas, Lancaster and Sarpy. All hit record population levels as of July 1st of last year and now account for more than 55% of the 1.93 million people in Nebraska. That's an all-time high. And at the same time, those counties, since 2010, they have added more than 107,000 people. And at the same time, the state has lost almost 4,500. The rest of the state, excuse me, the rest of the state has lost almost 4,500 people. So there is a definite shift happening in Nebraska. There is a definite change in what it means to be Nebraska. There is a tension between rural and urban. There is a tension between past and future. This is something that I saw immediately in all of these texts. And it was the thing that I went into the Nebraska Songbook Project hoping to engage with and be in dialogue with. What comes next for me is the music. And I'll begin by sharing this quote from Lennox Barkley, who was a British composer who passed away about 2008, but had a tremendous amount of vocal music. And he had this to say, one has only to think what a composer has to do to a poem. He has to destroy or at best modify its natural rhythm. He cannot possibly adhere to its actual meter. He then has to translate it into another medium. His only excuse for doing such a thing is that he feels he can recreate its atmosphere and feeling in the language of music. There is no way for a composer to be a poet. There is no way for a composer to mirror the energy. And there is no reason for a composer to mirror the energy of a poem. A composer's charge instead as I see it is to magnify the message of a poem, to highlight certain elements, to make the poem more powerful than it otherwise could be. And that by definition involves some distention of the meaning of the poem. That by definition involves making hard decisions about what the relationship between the text and the music are going to be, or is going to be, and how that relationship will evolve over the course of the song, the cycle, the work, which of course leads to this question, the big question, how can the music enrich the poetry? That is, what justifies the distention of the poem into a musical form from its original non-Sonic form. This process begins with a whole bunch of sketching. And when I say sketching, what I mean is getting a big blank sheet of music and writing notes on it, and writing notes on it with no home, no structure, no definitive left to write energy, but gathering musical ideas that the text brings to the forefront in the mind of the composer. This is step one, and once you have enough of these, then you can start engaging with the actual texts and figuring out how those ideas that you've created are going to fit inside of them. So we'll begin, we'll go chronologically to begin. Don Watch by Marilyn Dorf is a short, intensely beautiful poem that essentially tells the story of an old fish coming to the surface of a relatively placid body of water for just a second. And for me, this was indicative of echoing of so many of the bigger themes that I wanted to touch on in this cycle. If immorality, it cannot stay at the surface forever. Tension between past and future, as you read through the poem, you start to get the sense of struggle. This is an old fish. This is a fish that is maybe not as able as it once was to get to the top, to get to the surface of the water. And I wanted to paint this sense of growth and transformation and maybe even struggle. And that began with one of my favorite musical devices, which is pedal point. Now for those of you who don't know, pedal point is a musical device in which there is a single pitch that has held constant, obliquely, against a moving pitch and used to create certain levels of tension. My collaborator and colleague here, Brenda Riston, is going to help me with this part of the talk. And we're going to have some musical examples. So, Brenda, this is QA. This is the opening of Dawn Watch. The original idea was for this to continue for the entire cycle and have everything else evolve against it, constantly expanding around it until we finally get to the surface of the water. Within that, it's impossible to write, I think, vocal music without considering what is the relationship between the voice and the accompanying instruments. So there was always going to be this sense, and this is going to be a recurring theme here today, of dialogue between the soprano and the piano, where at least in this opening, what you're going to hear when you finally get a chance after I'm done rambling to listen to this song cycle is you're going to hear this call and response, this back and forth between these melodic phrases in the piano and what happens in the voice. And I wanted, as we went further in the cycle, to see how this idea in particular was going to evolve, which leads me to the second song, October by Shirley Butener. This is a really incredible poem in its own rights. It tells the story of really just paints a Nebraska Day in October, and there are a lot of ways I think you can interpret musically what the content of that poem is. But what I saw within it was this emphasis on motion, this emphasis on vibrancy, which struck me as odd since I had just finished a couple of Nebraska October's that were not that. So I latched on to this idea that even when it's 20 degrees out, and all the leaves are off the trees, or by contrast, when it's 87 degrees out and all the leaves are still on the trees, there's still this sense of motion, a sense of moving between two places. There are other things that fascinated me about this poem, but we'll get there in due time. To begin, I needed to create a vibrant mobile landscape, and my way of doing that was to find a piano ostinato that felt to me like it could be in constant motion. So what you're going to hear now, Brenda is going to play at the beginning of October. And once again, that is going to continue ad nauseam, and that is going to be married with long lyrical vocal lines, again exploring this relationship between voice and piano, and how they fit within the context of each other. And that constant motion in the piano is going to continue for most of the song. However, you will notice, I think if you read through the poem and if you sit with it for a couple of minutes, that there are these moments where the narrator ceases to look outward, ceases to look at the October day, and starts to look inward at themselves. And in those moments the constant motion of the piano is going to stop. In those moments, the piano is going to suspend. And to me, that is an indication that our focus has turned from the vibrant outside to the inside that maybe has another adjective attached to it. November Hawk by Stephen Barron is the longest poem in the set, and one that tells a really throttling story about a hawk that is seen and then not seen and then seen again. And explores lots of different themes within it, but the big ones that I derive from it are fear, mistrust, and guilt. And perhaps out of all four of the songs in the set, this one most directly engages, I think, with the theme of what we see versus what we do not see. And so this was all going to be, for me, a study in dichotomy. This song was going to be all about one thing versus another thing, and then perhaps at the end of the cycle discovering that the whole time we had misunderstood something, and we had done so to the peril of another creature. So I began with developing what were the musical materials I was going to use that were going to indicate the hawk in this story. And there are several tools at a composer's disposal to do this, but I chose two. One is the hawk motive, which is a small, recurring melody meant to signify something. One is a collection, which is a collection of notes. You may consider it to be a scale or a chord, that in this case, every time the music is derived from that collection, the hawk is in the air. Brenda's going to begin by playing QC, which is the hawk motive. That's it. But then outside of that, the hawk has a collection even when we're not aware of its presence, even when it's not visible we can always feel it. The hawk is always around, even when it's not visible. And that hawk collection consists of these notes. Anytime you hear harmonic material derived from those eight notes, you know the hawk is in the room. If the hawk has music, we must also have music. QE. This is the collection that represents humanity and its presence in the song. Every note in November Hawk is derived from one of those two collections and the whole song is really the story of evolving dominance. We begin with music that is dominated by the hawk's presence that even the humans, when they are sitting at Thanksgiving with company around the table they cannot concentrate on each other because they are thinking about that hawk. And as the cycle evolves and evolves and evolves we finally learn that not only was the hawk never a threat at all but it was our ignorance our fear that stopped us from attending to another creature in its time of need. So we begin then with hawk driven music, the hawk motive collection, and we slowly get overtaken by music that is taken from the human collection. And this brings me to Kim Tedros recent Angels. Recent Angels was written in memory of a woman named Tina Garacci who died very tragically and when I spoke to Kim directly about this song she mentioned that among the inspirations for it was Miss Garacci left behind a small child and she imagined the child looking for his mom and not being able to find her. And for me this was so interesting because it is a song that, or it is a text rather that doesn't have any what you might call in scare quotes Nebraska signifiers. There is no wide open prairie there is no sand hill cranes there is very little acknowledgement literally of the natural world that defines so much of the Nebraska experience but at the same time it is thematically literally occupying all of the same spaces that all three of these other texts are ephemerality tension between the seen and the unseen tension between the past and future when I thought about this text and I'm a very visual person I can't draw to save my life but I'm a very visual person when I thought about the vision of this text the image that it conjured for me this image that you see here of the Omaha skyline was the first thing that came to me was a different side of Nebraska that is not as removed from the rest of Nebraska as we tend to think and so I just wanted to paint the text that was my ultimate goal here this was a way to bring all of these forces that have been explored in the rest of the text into community with one another and the easiest tool that I had to do that at the beginning was recitative just a simple timeless song between the soprano and the piano that allowed me to just write what I thought of a really beautiful melody and then I entered the equation and began to shape my thinking about it and what I finally came up with were constantly ascending lines this is a song about angels after all and so QF is an example of some of the lines that we're going to hear in recent angels even with everything intersecting and overlapping you can tell that there's always a sense of ascension in the piano part when I started thinking more about the text and when I started thinking more about the relationship between the soprano and the piano what I finally decided was that even though the piano is in constant ascension the soprano is not there is a divide in recent angels between what we can see and what we cannot see and that manifests in the musical material of the singer versus the musical material of the piano this was the beginning was figuring out the story that I wanted to tell individually with each one of these songs but in addition as I said one of the primary goals that I had for the Nebraska Song Book was to create a world that acknowledged that all of these songs all of these texts were interconnected they all inhabited the same space both literally, geographically and emotionally so I set out at the beginning of the writing process in addition to find ways that I could connect these songs together musically to find ways in which the music could bring out the common themes of the text and I came up with two primary strategies for doing so one was to literally connect the songs using what I call pitch seams and the constituent harmonic areas of each song and the other was using that concept that we discussed earlier which is a very specific material to connect each one of the songs I'll begin with talking about pitch seams now what you see up here is a very poorly drawn graph that demonstrates just some of the major key areas of each one of these four songs Don, Watch, October The November Hawk and Recent Angels and we don't need to make too much discussion out of this but only to point out a bridge to the beginning of the next there was this sense I wanted there to ultimately be the sense that as we finish one song we were not smash cutting to a different part of Nebraska, we were not moving wholesale from one scene to another but rather that these were points on a gradient rather that these were part of a common tapestry and one of the ways to do that was to make sure that to the best of my abilities as a composer we were always picking up the left off with the previous song I also wanted to explore a motivic connection I wanted to come up with some material that I thought indicated that I thought indicated all of these varying thematic ideas that we've been discussing and what I came up with was this very small theme that I colloquially call the Nebraska motive and this is QG that motive is present ubiquitously in every single song that you're about to hear and it became the focal point of the compositional process now motivic composition is nothing new this is something that composers have been doing since people were writing music what I wanted to explore is in my own way using motives but in my own way what were all the ways that I could hide this motive that I could put it places that we would feel its presence but not be actively aware of its presence and was there a gradient in that were there times that it could be prominent and times that it could be less so so that led me to an exploration of all the different ways that I could play with the Nebraska motive all the different ways that I could support this motive one of the easiest ones is repetition and rhythmic and intervallic variations so we have this little excerpt from October and this is QH thank you Brenda this motive this melody comes from the Nebraska motive unequivocally we can see the connections we can also see that the rhythmic content has changed we're using different note values we're augmenting that is lengthening certain areas and we are shortening or diminishing certain areas but more importantly we're also as we go making other changes to the motive so in this particular case you'll notice that the second iteration of this motive has just widened the central interval and in doing so taken that fragment and made it feel just a little bit different it's still very much the Nebraska motive but it's a little bit different there are other tools that we have to do this as well fragmentation is a composer's best friend and this is simply the process of breaking down a motive to its constituent parts and exploring in their own motific ways some of these constituent parts so this is QI so you may have heard something that sounded like the Nebraska motive in that landscape and you may not have what's important is how they're conceived now I've highlighted two small fragments of the Nebraska motive on the screen a simple downward step and a simple three note contour pattern and what you'll notice if you look closely is that every single note of this melody is some sort of transformation of one of those two fragments so this is using the Nebraska motive in a hidden way to build a brand new melodic line there are other ways we can do this as well one of them is to start with the Nebraska motive or to start with the motive generally and remove notes from it to create a new motive this is from recent angels this is QJ again you may find some shades in the Nebraska motive of this or not but if you look at the notes present in the Nebraska motive what you may notice is that they are pulled from some of the notes in the Nebraska motive but not all of them what I've done here is I've taken away just a couple of notes to create a new motive entity to create a new melody that has its roots in the Nebraska motive but is not itself the Nebraska motive now a slightly more sophisticated way of doing this is through contrapuntal presentation of a motive like this from Don watch QK so the composition of this particular line begins by representing every single one of the notes of the Nebraska motive we can see them there you can see the top line is coded in blue and what you'll notice is now they're happening on top of each other they're overlapped with one another so this is again a way of mentioning two different motivic presentations or melodic presentations from the same motive and the Nebraska motive is of course always present in these sorts of textures and finally when all else fails transform all the intervals this is QL that doesn't bear too much sonic similarity to the simple plaintive Nebraska motive until you dig a little deeper and you see that every single one of these is an interval from the Nebraska motive that has been somehow distorted you can see that at the beginning I've added to that initial step I've added an octave later on I've just wholesale swapped interval types so the third and the second which were formally a second then a third have been swapped I've augmented intervals which means I've added intervalic space to them I've inverted them which means I've turned them upside down and because I am a jazz musician I've used a good old fashioned tritone sub at the end and treated a tritone equivalently to a unison now this is getting very jargony but really the point of it is that every time we hear something like this we may or may not be sonically aware of the Nebraska motive but my hope is a composer is that we are unconsciously aware of its presence my hope is a composer is that if I can put enough forethought into my compositional choices even when those compositional choices are buried below the surface then the echoes of those make their way to a listener and without necessarily having to hold that listener's hands through the connections that I see in all four of these texts and that I see in the music my hope is that if I'm doing my job correctly they can feel them and they can find all of these things that sense of community and togetherness even in dark times that motivated me to write the song cycle in the first place now before I turn it over to my colleagues for a performance of this I do need to acknowledge just a couple of people who without whom this would not have been possible many of them you've already met the Nebraska Music Teachers Association the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center my colleagues Jamie and Brenda Greg Kuzmicki at the Backwaters Press Teresa Ingram who handled permissions for Shirley Butener who had unfortunately passed away before I got a chance to ask her myself the Glencore School of Music my home away from home and of course this does not happen without the overwhelming support of every single one of the poets who are gracious enough to give me their creation and trust in my ability to make it into something new that is no small gift for an artist so as long as I have this particular podium and this particular microphone I'm going to take a moment to say thank you all so much it means the absolute world to me to be able to undertake this project finally if you are one of those people who likes to see all you got to do is snap that QR code and with that I will turn it over to my performance colleagues thank you so much for your time this is Nebraska Song Book I have a fence three feet from the feet punching without threat wild cardinals and finches prodded tubular feeders sifting millet from Niger Sea thistle watching them with beaks are white left and right thank you so much for sharing your talents with us we greatly appreciate it and we would like to open it up for some questions and answers and if you could we have volunteers who will bring you a microphone be sure and wait to get the microphone so that our friends on facebook and who are live streaming this can hear your questions as well so with that if you have any questions just raise your hand let us see you and our performers and composer would be happy to answer your questions your collaboration was beautiful and I'm curious from each of your perspectives what is the most challenging aspect of this piece so Greg says he yields the floor to us I don't know if that's a good answer or not I was really fortunate in the beginning of this collaboration Greg and I sat down for three hours I think and he asked me some very insightful questions about what it meant to be a singer what kinds of things I liked to sing what other composers I was fond of and so I feel very privileged because I feel like Greg wrote some of this whether he intentionally did it or not after some of the thoughts that we shared because these sorts this piece while very rhythmically challenging the long long lines are some of my favorite things to sing so I really enjoyed that and it was very much a gift to me to have Brenda at the piano because she is so pristinely precise rhythmically so it was great to know that she was there doing these very complex things that Greg had asked for in this musical soundscape but knowing that she was a solid rock and wasn't ever going to waiver that made what I had to do easier what was most challenging or what I've forgotten the question what was most challenging I also had an opportunity to sit down with Greg before he composed the piece which I really welcomed and he asked me what were some of my favorite things to play and my response to that was Debussy I love Debussy textures and so he wrote many of those into October which I have really enjoyed playing in terms of just the challenge I think the rhythmic elements of the piece the way the piece lies between the singer and the piano has its moments for sure but that's our job to figure that out well I had the opportunity to sit down with both of them before I started writing which is something that I think is given the opportunity indispensable for a composer especially if you're going to collaborate as Jamie knows very very well no human voice is the same as any other human voice and so when you're writing for a singer you are writing for a singer the challenge I suppose is in shaping my expressive intentions in such a way that I know will maximize not only the capabilities about the singers but do so in a way that is going to make them love the piece so much that they want to perform it because I think I can confidently say that all three of us have been involved in new music projects that we absolutely couldn't stand and that really does, we're all professionals we'll do it but it is so much nicer to do something you believe in and part of that I think is not only conceiving of what your favorite music to play and what your technical limitations are but also who these musicians are as people and especially in the context of a project like this learning from them what it means to be Nebraska and what it means in the case of Brenda who like me comes from elsewhere what it means to be an outsider who adopts a place as home those sorts of conditions take time and they take energy and occasionally we do and I think Brenda and I certainly did come at loggerheads over part of November Hawk at some point okay fair enough so yeah we didn't get in a fistfight or anything like that but there was some disagreement and there were some things that we had to hash out ultimately it's hard to describe it as a challenge because I do think the piece was something that I was ready for and was happy to kind of take on bring those sorts of comments on but it is a conversation that has to happen does that answer your question? Hi, my favorite was November Hawk and I was just curious did the authors of the poem give you free reign in composing their piece? The world of seeking poetic permissions is such that the more I can ask for what I need to legally set the piece and no more than that the better I regretfully was not as collaborative with the poets ultimately as I would have liked to be part of that was because I was on sort of a timeline I wanted to get it done while I was in residency I wanted to get it done while I was in my heart in Nelson center but to more directly answer your question the answer is yes the answer is yes I felt a lot of confidence from the poets in what I was doing and I was ultimately able to share with some of them for some of them this may actually be if they're tuning in the first time that they've heard some of them and do they hear some of them in fact so this may be a fun surprise to some of them and part of that was because this was commissioned by an MTA the premier was legally designated to take place at the conference which was only open to conference attendees and there's nothing more painful than a MIDI realization of a new piece of music so I opted not to share it but I think that when I approached them I'd like to think that I presented myself as very genuine and caring very deeply about wanting to do their work justice and especially with the case of Kim Tedra who was very, very open about the inspiration for recent angels and the story that inspired the writing of it and I always felt a great deal of confidence from them in what I was doing which is absolutely the sweet spot for a composer is I don't know what you're doing but I'm sure it's going to be great there's no better feeling in the world than to hear that for Greg as someone who admitted that you were not from Nebraska and hasn't been here for quite a long time were there people that you talked to when you were selecting these verses to get a representation of what you represented in Nebraska that you felt? It's a great question as I said there are maybe 12 to 14 different poems that I haven't gotten around to yet and one of the really special things about Nebraska presence is that it is a wild cross-section of different people and coming from all over Nebraska there are poets ranging from Shirley Butenure a few years ago all the way to one of the poets in the anthology was the ripe old age of 22 when she was published in it they come from Omaha they come from Shadrin they come from North Platte they come from Grand Island they come from right here in Lincoln a lot of them it is beyond me I think as a composer to represent universally what it means to be Nebraska any more than it is possible for me to represent be a human being every human being has a different experience and every Nebraska has a different experience I think my goal at the outset was to keep my ears open to people I trusted artists I trusted and try to tell their story best I could within that I also have this being UNL I have a lot of students who are from Nebraska and I did absolutely have a lot of conversations with them about what they thought it meant and about what especially because many of them are artists in training who want to go on to larger professional scenes want to make the dive to New York Chicago, LA, things like that we had a lot of conversations about identity and community and what they felt was what Nebraska meant to them and what was worth preserving about it so the answer is no but also yes I suppose thanks good work you guys so this is a question for Jamie because I know that she sings art song a bit what exactly is the definition of art song and why is this one an art song because that's a genre I take it and who are some of the leaders in art song so I would invite all of you to enroll in art song one which is offered every other fall at the Glencore School of Music if you would like to know more about the topic but to briefly answer Dino Connor's question art song I like to think about is a photograph of a moment as opposed to an aria which is often a larger work that lives in the context of a larger story like an opera or a favorite tune from a musical that lives in the context of a larger story an art song is a snapshot and it's often a poem but not always it can sometimes be prose that is set to music in typically a small form like this song cycle which is what we call a group of songs when they are programmed together by intention of the composer sometimes you can have one, three eight, twenty grouped designed to be performed all at the same time but Greg gave us four individual beautiful portraits to perform today and I think each of them provide a snapshot of part of the Nebraska experience art song particularly in the United States is alive and well I'm thrilled to say that some of the more familiar pieces that people might recognize composers would be things like Schubert and W.C. wrote several Melody which is what we call French art song so art song as we know it right now really began in 1814 with Schubert's most famous Gretchen at the spinning wheel but in the United States today art song is alive and well being set by really extraordinary composers of every ilk every race, nationality, gender persuasion that you can imagine it's a beautiful vehicle for composers to be able to share their thoughts and their reflections on the world and quite often those composers are setting texts that are written like Greg by living poets which makes for some really exciting collaborations and I feel so privileged being able to create these little snapshots for audiences as part of my creative work and so thank you for going through the photo album with us today okay well thank you again so very much for sharing your talents and thank you all for joining us this Friday afternoon well that was an incredible experience and we have just a little something to commemorate we make posters for these events and maybe you can help me there you go maybe take those away there you go I have three of them one for each and I hope this helps you remember this performance and this presentation it was again wonderful and I know that everybody really enjoyed being here with you and it's a special event for us to have as a Nebraska lecture here in the 150th year so thank you very much yeah