I Wonder If This Ground Has Anything to Say
(A Treaty Illumination) by Jerome Kitzke

Tribeca New Music and the Kaufman Music Center come tougher to co-produce the brilliant NYC composer-performer collective thingNY performing the World Premiere of Jerome Kitzke’s I Wonder If This Ground Has Anything to Say (A Treaty Illumination).
In his inimitable style, Kitzke fuses the rhythms of language and music into a powerful and urgent whole. With a 24-section libretto built by Kitzke from litanies of definitions, dates, names, places, and historic quotations—from Red Jacket to an unlikely Richard Nixon—the work sheds light on the existence of Treaties and Agreements made between the Indigenous Nations and the White Europeans/U.S. Government from 1613 to today. The Treaties made between 1775 and 1871 are still constitutionally the Law of the Land, and have often not been fully honored, especially in the areas of land base, education and health care. Kitzke’s musical illumination arrives as a fierce and timely reminder of the enduring legal and moral obligations set forth in the Treaties.

thingNY fuses electronic and acoustic chamber music with new opera, improvisation, theater, text, song, and installation, collaborating across disciplines, media and genres. 

Jerome Kitzke
Greetings! I was born in Milwaukee in 1955 and have lived in New York since 1984. My music arises from the North American landscape and celebrates vitality in its purest forms, thriving on the spirit of driving jazz, Plains Indian song, and Beat Generation poetry, where freedom and ritual converge. It is direct, dramatic, and visceral, always with an ear to the sacred ground. Often political and always topical, my music aims at revealing the heart of what it means to be an American early in the 21st Century, especially as it relates to how we live on this land and the way we came to live on it.