Updated October 21, 2026:
It’s almost here! Next Thursday 10/29 at the Schubert Club’s Courtroom Concert, 12 noon.
Low-voice sextet RenegadeEnsemble presents Before Dawn, a celebration of new works by seven Minnesotan composers written for low voices. Woven throughout the program are themes of perseverance and hope against dark and turbulent forces, including our inner turmoils and the stormy forces of nature. The centerpiece of the program is the world premiere of Carol Barnett’s Jenkins on the Lake, a commission from Schubert Club made possible by Barbara Brown and John Michel in honor of Max Carlson. Louis Jenkins lived in Duluth for 30 years, and his description of a Lake Superior lighthouse and sailors in port inspired the theme of this program. Also on the program will be the world and local premieres of works by Peter J. Durow, Jonathan Posthuma, and Scott Senko as well as a new low voice arrangement of a work by Libby Larsen called Home.
May 18, 2026:
Looking forward to the premiere of two more Louis Jenkins settings, thanks to the indefatigable John Michel and Barbara Brown. In 2020, John and Barb embarked on a project to commission art song settings of all 62 short poems in fellow Duluth resident Louis Jenkins’ last book, The Mad Moonlight. Fifty-seven new songs were written and premiered, including my rather spooky settings of “Young Witches,” “Old Witches,” and “Bat.”
Spurred on by the success of this first phase, John and Barb forged ahead to commission several more songs based Jenkins’ prose poems. I was assigned “The Lighthouse” and “Sailors,” both engaging and quirky portraits of life in Duluth. The challenge: how to evoke the deeper essence behind the words, from the inexorable ebb and flow of the great lake to the irrepressible spirits of sailors set free on a brief shore leave. The premiere is planned for the coming season of the Schubert Club Courtroom Concert Series.
THE LIGHTHOUSE
Light flashes across the water and is gone, like headlights across the wall of a dark room where someone is lying awake. It happens so quickly, no way to take back the things that were said. Your son drove headlong into a train. Your daughter is in a Mexican jail. It’s a house passed at eighty miles an hour. Did anyone live there? The night, the sea, the wind and the rocks, the terrible current off shore … It is good to see the light across the water. It is a warning. This is the place where the land ends and the water begins or the water ands and the land begins. Either way is dangerous.
SAILORS
When the ship gets into port the sailors all go nuts. They get drunk and dance and wake up the next afternoon the the whorehouse. And if a sailor gets thrown in jail he doesn’t care because he just got paid and has enough money to get out. None of the sailors wants to go back to the ship. One thing sailors can’t stand is the sight of water. One sailor hides out in a laundromat. One makes plans to marry. Another is still drunk. The sailors hate this lousy port. The ship sails at dawn with all hands, but someone has sneaked whiskey aboard. By midnight the crew is drunk and the ship is dead in the water. The captain is furious and shouts over the intercom to the engine room. But they are all asleep, rocked in their little cradle on the sea.
