A dark and delightful evening-length chamber work based on Carlo Collodi’s beloved The Adventures of Pinocchio, Pine Eyes is a rich mixture of music and words—a compelling adventure for the imagination that will captivate audiences of all ages. Martin Bresnick joins Zeitgeist to create a fantastic tale of transformation and discovery with plenty of the bewitchment, adventure, and heroism so crucial to a good fairy tale.
Pine Eyes was written by Martin Bresnick for Zeitgeist in 2008, and was commissioned by and premiered at the Walker Art Center. Pine Eyes is part of Bresnick’s body of work Opere della Musica Povera (Works of a Poor Music), which explores themes of poverty, extremity, and loss. The composer uses limited visual and musical resource to create work of gorgeous simplicity, great depth, and captivating immediacy.
Martin Bresnick‘s compositions, from opera, chamber and symphonic music to film scores and computer music, are performed throughout the world. Bresnick delights in reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable, bringing together repetitive gestures derived from minimalism with a harmonic palette that encompasses both highly chromatic sounds and more open, consonant harmonies and a raw power reminiscent of rock. At times his musical ideas spring from hardscrabble sources, often with a very real political import. But his compositions never descend into agitprop; one gains their meaning by the way the music itself unfolds, and always on its own terms.
Besides having received many prizes and commissions, the first Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Rome Prize, The Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Koussevitzky Commission, among many others, Martin Bresnick is also recognized as an influential teacher of composition. Students from every part of the globe and of virtually every musical inclination have been inspired by his critical encouragement.