An Ear to the Ground: Composer Jonathan Cziner pays special local tribute with new piece

Sometimes you listen to a piece of music, and it transports you to a different place. Composer Jonathan Cziner’s latest work does exactly that.  

A Juilliard-educated composer working in Dallas, Texas, Cziner is also the artistic director of Voices of Change, a new music initiative that champions the work of living composers. He has long held a connection to Minnesota through performances of his music by the Minnesota Orchestra and has been a collaborator with the Lakes Area Music Festival in Brainerd, Minnesota.  

His newest piece, North Long Lake, MN, recently premiered at the Lakes Area Music Festival. It is inspired by its eponymous location and is dedicated to two special members of that community.    

Cziner wrote the piece for Don Bennett, one of the board members of the Lakes Area Music Festival, who lost his wife Mary Anne Bennett last summer. “She was one of the driving forces of the festival,” Cziner says, “and I wanted to write a piece dedicated to her memory.”  

North Long Lake, MN centers the Bennett's’ relationship and their love of the lake. “It is a character portrait of a person, and a tone painting of the lake,” Cziner says. “It’s about encapsulating both of those things.”  

The piece is a nuanced and layered representation of place and people, and Cziner asserts it comes from the heart. “In some inexplicable way, there’s something very special about this particular place in Minnesota that was very inspiring,” he says.  

The connection of the music to that place is right in the title, of course, but Cziner also created musical representations for Don and Mary Anne, and for the lake.   

To do this, Cziner devised a special musical alphabet to attach certain notes to Don’s and Mary Anne’s initials and to North Long Lake, so the presence of their relationship to each other and to the water can be heard in the musical passages. By composing in this way, Cziner hopes audiences who hear North Long Lake, MN can feel a sense of place while listening.   

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Jonathan Cziner: North Long Lake, MN (world premiere)

In his compositions, deliberate strides of musical expression stem from a deep appreciation for the way the music can convey feeling to his audience. “Contemporary music doesn’t have to be a scary, esoteric thing,” Cziner says. He believes “part of being a living composer allows us to go into communities and communicate with people.” That connection with the world allows his music to speak widely across sets of people, meeting them where they are.   

Accessibility is one of the pillars of Cziner’s music, where he takes lived experiences of the everyday and writes them into works anyone can feel connected to. Nostalgia is a huge center of many of his compositions, thinking about places and memories as a way to channel musical meaning.   

The physicality and transience of the world are also huge themes across Cziner’s music. “We’re transient, we’re mortal, we’re not perfect, and that’s a pretty deep thing,” he says. "I think what’s so moving about it is being able to take that idea that’s terrifying and make something beautiful out of it…Some things can be very physical.”  

Cziner thinks there’s a pressure that comes with composing now where every artist feels like they have to find “their voice,” completely different from everyone else’s. This way of thinking makes the act of trying to create something more difficult than it already is, but Cziner has a way to work around this: “I find that my voice, whatever that may be, comes through in me being me, and the music I love to write,” he says. “It’s important for me to push myself, and try something new as an artist, but still stay true to what I love.”  

True to his artistic direction, Cziner thinks about what the audience will take away. Just before the premiere of North Long Lake, MN, he said he was most excited to be at the Lakes Area Music Festival with its community members to experience the music together.   

“That,” he said, “will be the coolest part of it.”