How can a musical community come together to emotionally process life in a changing and forever-changed environment? The three compositions in this performance explore responses to this question by composers Scott Rubin, Alissa Voth and Ben Zucker as well as videographer Zack Sievers. Performers seek to create a shared musical space for reckoning with themes of nature, loss, nostalgia, erosion and erasure on multiple planes. Interspersed between these pieces are short film clips exploring themes of ritual, healing, and environmental change in which both the musicians from the trio and some of their friends engage with the rapidly changing ecosystems of the Warren Dunes.

Composing the Climate is a continuation of pianist Cacie Miller's doctoral project. This set of pieces was commissioned and collaboratively prepared by Miller and Missing Piece (Dan Galat and Kelly Quesada). Each work takes a distinct approach to facing the changing climate. Rubin’s trio narrates the history of human “progress” and its destructive march in a work that interleaves notated and improvised movements. Voth’s work sensitively explores “Solastalgia,” mourning of an anticipated loss. Zucker’s piece uses the instrumentation of the piano trio to model the concept of subscendence, as the trio members shift between listening to themselves and each other as they move through Zucker’s indeterminacy-sprinkled score.

These commissions and their preparation were funded in part by the Illinois Arts Council.

Cacie Miller, piano

Cacie Miller has relied on the sounds and repertoire of the piano to help her make sense of the world around her since a young age. She is drawn to compositions packed with colorful storytelling and especially those that seem to push through the edges of reality. She relishes these qualities in the music time honored composers such as Beethoven, Liszt, Debussy and Bartok, and in contemporary composers such as Lera Auerbach and Reena Esmail. Sometimes Cacie improvises and composes on her instrument.

Cacie’s musicianship was fostered by several teachers throughout her university studies. She studied piano with William Heiles, Rebecca Penneys, and Robert Glover, theory with Steve Laitz, and harpsichord with Charlotte Mattax Moersch. She holds degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (DMA in Performance and Literature), the Eastman School of Music (MA in theory pedagogy), Houghton University (MM in piano), and the University of Southern Maine (BM in piano). These studies informed Cacie’s playing and her own teaching through work on body/emotion integration at the piano, use of analytical practices to inform interpretive decisions, and practicing intentional listening to prepare communicative performances.

With hope of working toward sustainable cultural practices, Cacie has been actively working on the project Composing Our Climate, which began during her doctoral research. This project focuses on performer-driven commissioned chamber works written to work through emotional reckonings with the climate crisis.

Dan Galat, violin

Dan Galat is a Chicago-based violinist and violist, a classically trained performer comfortable across a wide range of styles and techniques. Working primarily with living composers, Dan can be found with Chicago's new music ensembles such as Fulcrum Point New Music or as the concertmaster of Chicago Composers Orchestra. Dan Galat is the founding member of Missing Piece with cellist Kelly Quesada, a Chicago music ensemble that endeavors to commission new musical works and works from other artistic disciplines on themes that inspire others to connect with their community, care for our environment, listen deeply to ourselves and others, and speak out against injustice.

Dan Galat is active across a variety of styles, including Baroque music with the Bach Cantata Vespers, or as a recording musician, recently with Manuel Cinema in their short film Future Feeling. Dan was the violinist, violist, and backup vocalist for the 24-show premiere in Chicago of Illinoise, the adaptation of Sufjan Stevens's album into a musical now on Broadway. Dan has freelanced with many orchestras including Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra, Louisiana Philharmonic, and Columbus Indiana Philharmonic (concertmaster). Dan received his BM and MM at Indiana University, studying with Kevork Mardirossian, Desiree Ruhstrat, and Joseph Swensen.

Kelly Quesada, cello

Kelly is a Chicago transplant who continuously finds herself inspired by the city, its history, and its potential. She has 2 college degrees in classical cello performance and has lived and worked in three distinct regions of the US (Alabama, Oregon, Ohio) before landing in Chicago. She divides her time between practicing and performing music, teaching music, helping out in her communities, and trying to find little pockets of joy.

Scott Rubin, composer

Scott Rubin is Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and improvising violist whose work interrogates relationships between sound and movement through analog and digital means. His recent projects have involved collaborations with musicians and dancers, often incorporating interactive acoustic/electronic improvisation, expanded performance practices, motion-sensing data, and live video. In these projects, he engages themes of intimacy, control, and the sublime.

Alissa Voth, composer

Alissa Voth (she/her) is a composer and paper artist based in Chicago IL. Her creative work explores narrative and the unconscious mind with an artistic focus on the voice and woven imagery. Recent works include commissions from Masso Quartet, Garden Unit, Timothy Hanley, and Tyler Harper. Additionally, her music has recently been performed by the Stare at the Sun choir, the Unheard-of Ensemble, and Seth Parker Woods. Her music has been premiered and performed at festivals and venues such as at the UT Contemporary Music Festival, Constellation’s Fequency Series, the New School of Music, the Cortona Sessions for New Music, the Isador Bajic School, the deCordova Sculpture Museum, the Boston New Music Initiative, and the North American Saxophone Alliance. She is a PhD candidate at the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, where she focuses her studies on music cognition and composition pedagogy. She formerly attended the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, which she now returns to as composition faculty for their summer composition intensive program.

https://www.alissavoth.com/

Ben Zucker, composer

Ben Zucker uses music to speculate on the systems and shapes of change, which has lead to a wide-ranging career as a composer, multi-instrumentalist improviser, producer, and cultural worker, with contributions to experimental scenes across North America and Europe. Acclaimed as a "master of improvisation" (IMPOSE Magazine), and “more than a little bit remarkable” (Free Jazz Blog), their work includes “stirring compositions…built on a lifetime of musical curiosity” (Chicago Reader), performed by artists including Third Coast Percussion, Ensemble Dal Niente, David Moliner, Khorikos, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Distractfold Ensemble, and Musica Nucleo Nova. As a performer, he utilizes vibraphone, brass, keys, voice, and electronics across styles including with musicians such as Anthony Braxton, Gareth Davis, the Vocal Constructivists, Karen Borca, Rinde Eckert, and Beth Orton, and makes frequent local appearances as an ensemble contributor and bandleader of experimental jazz quartet Fifth Season and creative music collective Mad Myth Science, the latter called “the next generation of Chicago jazz” by the Quietus. Following PhD studies at Northwestern University, they continue to live in Chicago, working as a freelance musician, lecturer, President of New Music Chicago, and curator for Elastic Arts’ Improvised Music Series.

Zack Sievers, videographer

Zack Sievers’ research background in time consciousness, haptics, and temporal aesthetics (PhD Philosophy, Villanova 2024) informs cinematography aesthetics for Composing the Climate’s new performance. Sievers creates 3 silent monochrome films, all shot at Lake Michigan dunes locations, gravitating around questions of time, nature, and community. Strangers and wanderers meet in the wilderness of sand to share tea, amidst paying creative, sacred attention to the landscapes and wildlife. It is a question of both memory and imagination: how do the dunes, the leaves, the travelers, the waves, the sun and the sand, measure and record time? Recent and upcoming works in film by Sievers include directing the feature Slovene mockumentary The Good Curse of Bird Mummy Moon (releasing 2025), co-directing full album music videography with Gustavo Cortiñas' for The Crisis Knows No Borders (releasing 2025), and co-creating, writing, and producing the short sci-fi Wizdom (2024). Other notable works include “Haptic Spider: Non-Human Eye”, an experimental documentary of Spider Festival (2022), full album music videography for Gustavo Cortiñas’ Desafío Candente (2020), experimental archival documentary work on Bara Kolenc’s Izumitelj na zemlji (2021), screenwriting "Golden Voices" (2018), and directing “Haptic Cinematography” (2017) and “Closed Frame” (2014).

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