Sunday, April 13, 2025 • 3 p.m.
Wexner Center for the Arts Galleries
Columbus, OH
Program
Jour d'été a la montagne
Eugene Bozza
P4 Flute Quartet
Sofia Geelhood, Allie Gerckens, Jonathan Mitchell, Braden Stewart
to be felt is never fleeting
Olivia Katz
Kohesion Trio
Kaleigh McGee, clarinet
Brandon Golpe, bassoon
CJ Smyth-Small, piano
Entr’acte
Jacques Ibert
Karis Brennan, flute
Alex Paquet, guitar
Okukoowoola Kw’Ekkondeere
Justinian Tamusuza
Olivia Boden, horn
In Freundschaft
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Lucinda Dunne, soprano saxophone
Eclectic Trio
Catherine McMichael
Zephyr Winds
Meagan Gaskill, flute
Kaleigh McGee, clarinet
Austin Spillman, saxophone
Extremes
Jason Treuting
Matt Hanson, Noah Landrum, Nathan Smith, Haydn Veith, percussion
Artist Statements
Braden Stewart
Jour d'été a la montagne | Eugene Bozza
4 Bodies 1 Screen by Maria Hupfield is a performance of four people interacting over a live video call. It was performed in 2020 and was a way for Hupfield to continue her work giving live interdisciplinary performances. This live performance is very similar to a performance of Eugene Bozza’s “Jour d'été à la montagne” for four flutes. The four artists performed from a score that they created, which gave them areas where they would purposefully move together, or separately, or improvise. This is comparable to any musical quartet, where the music performed is from a score that gives each musician a time to shine, but also moments of unity, and even moments for improvisation.
In 4 Bodies 1 Screen, at some points all four artists are moving in contrary ways, and you aren’t always sure what to watch. In much of the fourth movement of Bozza’s quartet, the musicians are all active, and the audience can choose to focus on different musicians and what they are playing. I encourage the audience to explore the feeling of choosing which musician to focus on, much like the feeling of choosing to focus on one of the artists in 4 Bodies 1 Screen. Hupfield’s work tackles the challenge of building a community through a screen with people miles away. The work explores what it means to coexist virtually, and exchanges ideas across cultures and boundaries. It begins with the artists being completely separate and not sharing ideas. At this point, the camera angle and actions of the artists are quite disjunct. This parallels the first movement of Bozza’s quartet, “Pastorale.” The piece opens with a solo flute, without the harmony of the other flutes. It takes time for the flutes to find a unified sound. In this movement, Bozza features interjections between parts overtaking the melody, and includes times when the melodies conflict. Towards the end of 4 Bodies 1 Screen, Hupfield chooses to bring all four artists together. They end the performance on the same wavelength, with a very similar silhouette from each camera. At this point, the artists have seen each other and now mostly watch the screens. They are more aligned with their actions, drinking water together, or even brushing their teeth together. This shows how they were able to overcome their barrier with communicating and align to each other, despite the limitations. In the fourth movement of Bozza’s piece, “Ronde,” the flutes have aligned, and now support each other more regularly. This shows how the parts have aligned through the piece and are able to finally come together. Just as the artists were able to imitate each other in the performance, musical lines imitate each other in the finale of this quartet. There are many parallels between the stories of each of the works, and I encourage the audience to seek these out as they listen to the performance. Above all else, shines the story of voices that begin separated but learn to unite.
CJ Smyth-Small
to be felt is never fleeting | Olivia Katz
The Kohesion Trio will perform "to be felt is never fleeting" by queer contemporary composer Olivia Katz in direct response to the themes of the Nancy Holt: Power System and Maria Hupfield: The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan) exhibitions. Katz’s work (2024) is an exploration of presence, perception, and the cyclical nature of time, aligning deeply with the exhibitions’ investigations of systems, power, and interaction.
"to be felt is never fleeting" invites both performers and listeners into a structured yet intuitive journey through the twelve moons of the calendar year. Each moon is not only a temporal marker but a system of transformation, much like the environmental and social frameworks Holt and Hupfield engage with. The sonic process of gradual emergence, intensification, and dissipation mirrors Holt’s interest in revealing hidden infrastructures — whether electrical, ecological, or conceptual. The piece enacts a perceptual shift, similar to Holt’s Pipeline or Electrical System, where what is often unseen is made tangible through performance.
Hupfield’s work in activating objects and storytelling through performance finds a parallel in "to be felt is never fleeting." Katz encourages performers to navigate each moon’s descriptors through improvisational timbres, forging relationships between sound, space, and audience. This mirrors Hupfield’s participatory approach, where art exists in dialogue with those who engage with it. By moving through elemental themes — air, water, fire, and earth — the piece also resonates with Hupfield’s decolonial perspectives, considering natural cycles and Indigenous epistemologies that resist linearity and fixed meaning.
Furthermore, this performance highlights the role of personal and collective discovery. The silent pauses between each moon serve as moments of reflection, asking listeners to reconsider how time and sound shape their environment. This approach is deeply attuned to Holt’s and Hupfield’s thematic inquiries: how do we perceive and participate in the systems around us? How do materiality and ritual construct meaning? How does performance itself serve as a site of power and interaction?
The Wexner Center’s focus on interrogating systems — both visible and obscured — makes it an ideal venue for "to be felt is never fleeting." Our trio will bring this work to life as an ephemeral system: one that emerges, unfolds and disappears, yet leaves an imprint on those who experience it. Just as Holt and Hupfield challenge conventional boundaries between art, space and audience, our performance will invite a reconsideration of listening as an active, embodied practice. We look forward to contributing to this dynamic dialogue through sound and presence!
Karis Brennan
Entr’acte | Jacques Ibert
In reflecting on the abundance of artwork currently being exhibited in the Wexner Center for The Arts, we were particularly struck by the expansive artwork of Maria Hupfield. In her exhibits and short films, she uses what she self-identifies as “Indigenous storytelling” to reflect on the past, present and future. Her work The Supernatural Powers of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan) is especially striking, invoking power, serenity, joy and strength.
Maria Hupfield used unorthodox methods of joy and light to focus on the resilience and strength of the Indigenous people, even though the content (the erasure, eradication and violence that has been enacted upon Indigenous cultures), is immeasurably dark. While some artists choose to channel that experience into painful, anxiety-ridden work (with good reason and great success) — Hupfield instead focuses on the power and strength that Indigenous people and their stories hold. Her work is soft, interactive, and full of light.
When preparing for this proposal, I couldn’t shake how Alex and I left each rehearsal with such an abundance of joy and energy. This hugely contrasted the weight and reality of our “real” lives, which include personal and political stressors that have only multiplied in the last few weeks. There are things to be scared about, things to protest and fight back on, but at the heart of it, we can find joy in making music together.
From our current duet repertoire, we choose “Entr’acte” for Flute/Violin and Guitar/Harp by Jacques Ibert. It was composed in 1935 and can be summarized as a light-hearted pastiche of Spanish music, especially flamenco, that Ibert admired. While Ibert falls into a common trend of non-Spanish artists idolizing flamenco for its “authenticity” and “passion” in the face of an increasingly industrialized Europe, even when Spaniards’ own relationship with Flamenco was more complex. Flamenco began with the Roma people (formerly considered “gypsies,” but this term is no longer in use) and was largely despised by the Spanish elite throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Many considered it a “perverted outcome of secularization” and it was largely disregarded before, and until the Franco Regime and Spanish Civil War. Eventually, it was realized to be a profitable tourist attraction and since then has become a complicated symbol of Spanish culture and music. This leads us to “Entr’acte,” a beautiful piece with a complicated past.
We see this in connection to the Indigenous stories that Hupfield connects in her work, in this variation we are playing a piece fraught with historical implications. Both the Roma and Indigenous people faced hardship due to fascist regimes and in both scenarios, we can utilize light and celebration to find peace in the circumstances. For Hupfield this meant reflecting on Indigenous storytelling and resilience and for us this meant learning where Ibert’s influence came from and how we can do better in the future than we did in the past — all while finding the community and joy in music-making that we so desperately need.
Olivia Boden
Okukoowoola Kw’Ekkondeere | Justinian Tamusuza
My selection, “Okukoowoola Kw’Ekkondeere”, connects with Wexner Center for the Arts’ gallery, Storytelling, through the connections to indigenous cultures and techniques used to tell a story. “Okukoowoola Kw’Ekkondeere” is a Gandan-style horn call written by Ugandan composer, Justinian Tamusuza. Tamusuza writes in an African style but for Western instrumentation and notation which creates unique playing techniques for the performer like semitones, flutter tonguing, and removing horn slides. Thinking of its tie to Hupfield’s Storytelling, both these works of art are reflecting on indigenous traditions written by indigenous composers and demonstrating these stories through everyday materials. For example, Hupfield uses supplies like industrial felt and metal tin bells to create the image of the Fabulous Panther while Tamusuza uses the removal of valve slides on the horn and tapping on a mute to drive the narrative of the hunt. Both these artists go beyond using expensive materials or multiple instruments and instead use accessible tools to tell their stories through the sum of their parts.
Performing this selection as part of the Counterpoints series allows me to celebrate art created by underrepresented artists and show the musicality and artistry in non-Western art. I want to show that these collections should be considered beautiful not by their “exotic” nature, but by their unique and inspiring artistic components. I hope that through this performance that I will guide the audience to create their own perspective of the stories created by Hupfield and Tamusuza.
Lucinda Dunne
In Freundschaft | Karlheinz Stockhausen
In Freundschaft is a memorized solo choreographed work originally for clarinet by Karlheinz Stockhausen, arranged for various instruments including the soprano saxophone. Its choreography takes us on a journey through musical and tonal relationships, emphasized theatrically with physical movement from the performer, written specifically by the composer. Nancy Holt’s Heating System is a series of functional steel pipes, with visitors controlling the hot water flowing through them and therefore changing the temperature of the room. Part of the exhibition includes a gauge which records changes in temperature and humidity in blue and red ink, which Holt interprets as the sculpture "creating its own drawing." There are multiple outputs in both works, connecting In Freundschaft with Heating System. Stockhausen’s serial composition uses the 12 pitches in music in a specific order to build the melodic material. Throughout the work, motifs within the pitch order are assigned a physical instruction for the performer to adhere to, for example, for higher pitches, the saxophone bell must be directed upwards, out of the expected regular performing space. The structure of the higher and lower pitched motifs create their own type of drawing physically in space through the movement of the saxophone, just like Heating System creates its own ink drawing through its functionality. Curiously, there is a loop as a prominent feature in both works, which initially drew me to Heating System as a partner to In Freundschaft.
Meagan Gaskill
Eclectic Trio | Catherine McMichael
Kelly Kivland and Catherine McMichael both created works through deconstructionism, challenging their audiences to consider of the seeming fragmentation of combining works from different eras or cultures. They both took inspiration from preexisting works and styles, and added their own frames to examine how context can change how we experience the juxtaposition of cultures and styles that we aren't used to seeing together.
Kivland's work interacts with the deconstructionist design of the Wexner Center building, which is a combination of a historical brick armory building with a metal grid. Kivland responded to this architecture and created the four works of Color Block No. 2; the color blocks are modular furniture units that reframe how the Wexner building is experienced. They add another element to the seemingly fragmented architecture and challenge how a different context can change our experience of even something familiar.
McMichael's deconstructionist composition, Eclectic Trio, reflects on the same themes as Kivland's work through three short, sparse dances from different periods and cultures. The unifying thread through each distinct dance is the three unique voices (flute, clarinet, and alto saxophone) and how they interact through melodies and countermelodies. McMichael's work allows listeners to reflect on how they interact with this juxtaposition of dances from different cultures and periods and how the timbral context impacts the experience. Her work allows listeners to aurally experience and reflect on the combination of dances from three time periods and cultures and consider how the context of the instrumentation impacts that experience.
Nathan Smith
Extremes | Jason Treuting
When one visits a large city for the first time, they may be overcome by the size, noises, or seemingly never-ending movement of its populace. Large epicenters of population breed the most interesting and unique opportunities for people to create, interact, and be human. Two such artists that have spent their lives capturing the unique unwritten system of being human within our environment are Jason Treuting, renowned composer and percussionist, and Nancy Holt, innovator of site-specific installation and the moving image.
I was immediately drawn to Nancy Holt’s Heating System in Gallery C. Upon researching, there were concepts that surprised and inspired me. One in particular was that this exhibit is meant to be set up differently each time. From a musician’s perspective, this screams out in a language that is so familiar. As musicians, we are very accustomed to putting out our own art, knowing that each performance will be a unique experience. This parallel between exhibitable art and musical art is a beautiful example of how moments can rarely be replicated. What inspired me to think of Treuting’s writing was Holt’s “system”. Holt’s exhibit is made up of fully interactive pipes with working heat. This raises a question: “If the orientation of the pipes isn’t operationally necessary, why make them that way?” These pipes don’t resemble traditional pipes in city buildings — in fact they are almost playful. While Holt may not have had this in mind, I would like to answer this with another piece of art.
Much like the car horns in Gershwin’s An American in Paris, or Reich’s street recordings in City Life, Treuting uses our environment to inspire his music. "Extremes," a movement from Imaginary City, uses stacked cymbals, bass drum, and pitched pipes to emulate the bustling nature of cities, historic buildings, and their people. "Extremes" was written using a specific system of rules that must be followed. Treuting provides six cities (which were a part of the consortium): Denver, Helena, Burlington, Cleveland, Brooklyn and Houston. The rule states each consonant of each city is to be played as an eighth note, and the vowels with dotted eighth notes. Besides instructions regarding form and what surfaces to play each note on, that is essentially the basis of "Extremes." I can’t help but ask myself: why did he leave this up to interpretation? He could have written it in a traditional manner — in fact I’m sure it would be more accessible if he had. I believe he did this to ensure that each performance was unique and that the performers would feel encouraged to take his system and apply it to create their own art.
Much like Holt’s exhibits that live and breathe in their respective environments, no two performances of "Extremes" are the same. Both artists demonstrate that our environments, our thoughts, and our feelings inspire each performance we give. Their message to us is to savor these moments: each one is special, each one is unique, and most importantly, they’re yours.
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