PROGRAM

Life of a Tree: Karl Mitze

Voodoo Dolls: Jessie Montgomery

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Karl Mitze - Life of a Tree

An accomplished violist, mandolinist, singer, and composer, Karl Mitze holds various music degrees from Mercer University, the University of Maryland and the University of Texas at Austin. He is also a founding and current member of the award-winning touring ensemble, Invoke with whom he travels nationally and internationally as a performer and pedagogue. When he isn’t performing and teaching, Karl enjoys rock climbing, board games, and walking his dogs, Kora and Max. A huge baseball fan, he follows the Cincinnati Reds avidly and rarely misses a game. He is also an avid runner, a weekend Xbox player, lover of fantasy novels, and enjoyer of anything related to Dungeons and Dragons. As an orchestral musician, he served as the principal violist of the Central Texas Philharmonic from 2015-2023 and he regularly subs with the Austin Symphony among others. As a composer and arranger, he is in demand in Texas and beyond and very much enjoys weaving his background in folk and celtic music with the sounds of modern day chamber music and rock. You can often find him enjoying a beer at a trivia night somewhere in Austin, TX.

He writes:

Even though I did not initially think of this piece as a more literal narrative work, as I worked through it and listened back to what I was writing this idea formed in my head of the life cycle of forests. Quite simply, seeds, acorns and such fall to the earth, knocked down by wind or buried by animals in one way or another. Then for a long period of time the seed or acorn exists in this sightless, sunless space beneath the dirt where it slowly transforms. When it is ready, it pushes its first shoot out towards the sunlight and then grows in an inevitable, determined, and seemingly unstoppable manner until its leaves reach the sky.

The piece is in three distinct sections that roughly equate to this cycle. The first section is flowing and breezy like wind through fall leaves with a small melody traveling above rising and falling scales. The second section is deeply internal and features a restrained violin solo that eventually blossoms through the other instruments and pushes the piece into a point of stasis where a bass solo reprises the original melody from the beginning of the piece. The final section is essentially a single idea that repeats itself over and over again. It starts at a point of simplicity and vulnerability, like a young sprig, and grows steadily until it has reached a point of soaring expansion where the low rumbles of roots in earth are contrasted by the heights that this tree and its branches have achieved.

Jessie Montgomery - Voodoo Dolls

Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and her works are performed frequently around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).

She writes:

Voodoo Dolls was commissioned in 2008 and choreographed by the JUMP! Dance Company of Rhode Island, a collaborative work among their faculty and students. The choreography was a suite of dances, each one representing a different traditional children’s doll: Russian dolls, marionettes, rag dolls, Barbie, voodoo dolls… The piece is influenced by West African drumming patterns and lyrical chant motives, all of which feature highlights of improvisation within the ensemble.

Roster

Violin

Nick Montopoli

Amy Harris

Zach Matteson

Leigh Wallenhaupt

Camille Schiess

Abi Bellorín

Christabel Lin

Haley Dietz

Viola

Karl Mitze

Rohan Joshi

Luis Bellorín

Blake Turner

Cello

Liz Lee

Ilia de la Rosa

Rylie Harrod

Tony Rogers

Bass

Andrea Beyer

Jonathan Rouse