I have a friend who likes to ask, “Are you a creature of emotions, or a creature of thought?” I have known him long enough to know the answer: we could feel before we could think, therefore we are creatures of emotion that developed thought as a way to understand what we felt.
This question comes back to me sometimes when engaging with the avant-garde, which so often feels like the product of highly abstracted thought imposed over really intense emotions. It’s why, in my opinion, certain genres of art can be difficult to untangle, as the level of abstraction removes the work out of the realm of universal (i.e. emotional) and into the realm of individual (i.e. thought). If this balance also interests you, you will want to attend Present Music’s “Baroque Pop!” at the Milwaukee Art Museum on Sunday, May 25, from 7:30-9:30 p.m.
Here are your artists and their roles in the piece: The night will open with a solo harpsichord composition from the Baroque era by François Couperin that will transition into an experimental number by the string quartet, forming a bridge between the classical and the contemporary portions of the show. A piece by Caroline Shaw will follow. For anyone unfamiliar with Shaw’s work, this will be a special introduction. Julia Holter will then perform an idiomatic and well-tailored song cycle by Alex Temple. After a brief intermission, Tashi Wada will fill the atrium with atmospheric compositions at a time of the evening when it is most bathed in a dusky, watery light.
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The cycle, “Behind The Wallpaper,” was written by Temple specifically for Holter’s vocal range and talents, which rise and swirl with the nimble string accompaniment. During this portion of the show, the string quartet melds into a single responsive musical entity, so synched with Holter there are hardly moments in the cycle that distinguish the voice from the instruments. Holter’s voice is velvety, fluid. It does indeed feel Baroque, but like a salon interior, with rich, sumptuous textures and silky details made soft by the golden hour. But the lyrics are slick and modern. There is a razor’s edge to the storyline, a shivering in the narrative that is not certain it wants to be seen. She sings of tedium and withdrawal and fear, but always in the second person, employing a universal “you” in place of the essayistic “I” (although in most cases that are not epistolary, these are interchangeable).
It is these decisions that lend mystery and dread to a song cycle that sounds, at the surface, bright and contemporary. Holter is no stranger to such complexities, and a discerning audience will feel before they can articulate what the cycle communicates in its entire arc. Think Fiona Apple meets Scott Walker—Tidal and Scott 3 poured over early CocoRosie. You don’t need to log many hours with these albums to feel the tension between emotional roiling and a sparkling abstract intellect.
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As for Wada’s compositions, they are expansive and oscillatory, his songs like phrases stretched out and sanded down into the basic elements of an experimental language. Time becomes soft and circular, submersing the audience in a complex translation between abstract thought and contemporary sound. Yet the compositions feel like exercises in the way the sounds emphasize the present, allowing the composer to bend and shape time without adhering to familiar structures. Wada’s familial tie to the Fluxus movement of the ’60s is and ’70s emerges as an influence in the way the compositions underscore the practice of making music as a way to elevate a moment in earthbound time to a moment in universal time.
In the best cases of Baroque pop, contrast is still somehow stabilizing. In other cases, it is sanitized and dance-worthy. What you will see and hear at the 95-minute Present Music performance in the Calatrava atrium belongs to the former. Much like the architecture within which this will be performed, the music is ornate without tipping into the point of saccharine, and maintains a classical hold on tradition while infusing experimentation into the arrangements.
And like the Art Museum, we Milwaukeeans are once again tremendously lucky to have artists and composers in our city—as natives and boomerangs and visiting luminaries—to show us work that is new and interesting, even while it holds conversation with paintings from the Spanish Golden Age. These are composers that will make the question I posed at the beginning of the article difficult to answer. It may be downright impossible to separate thought from feeling during this dynamic performance.
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