SMU music faculty to perform at marine art museum

“A Celebration of Words, Music, and Images” — featuring William Neil, artistic director and 2008 McKnight Visiting Composer with the American Composers Forum — will be held 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 11, at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum.

The event will include six world premieres performed by some of the most gifted classical and folk musicians in the region. The performance will feature six distinct musical perspectives on the themes so sensitively expressed by the poets James Armstrong (poet laureate for the city of Winona), Chad Mikal Oness, and Elizabeth Oness.

“A Celebration of Words, Music, and Image” features the Duisigh Ensemble, a consortium of classical and folk musicians whose work is inspired by the city of Winona. New works by SMU Music Department faculty Dr. Patrick O’Shea and A. Eric Heukeshoven will be performed by Dr. Janet Heukeshoven and WSU faculty Paul Vance and Dan Sheridan, along with Ariane Lydon, Tim Britton, and Devin McCabe.

Heukeshoven’s piece, narrated by the Armstrong, draws contemporary parallels to the life and times of Charles Stewart Parnell who visited Winona in the late 19th Century. The work utilizes traditional Irish and American folk music to evoke the era described in Armstrong’s poem.

O’Shea’s song cycle, a setting of Armstrong’s poems, examines the coming to this area of the Dakota, Irish, Germans, Poles and Hmong and features interesting and expressive combinations of the ensemble including the singer playing hand-drum.

Tickets are $18.96 ($9.48 for students). The cost includes access to audio and video interviews with the artists, admission to the main event and access video excerpts from the live concert. A reception prepared by MyChef Creations will follow the concert.

For more information, call 800-822-4373.