Pneuma is a work for three wind players and harmonium, distributed throughout the performance space. The wind players move through the room, while the harmonium remains rooted at its center. The word pneuma comes from the Greek for breath, wind, or spirit. In this piece, breath is both sound and metaphor: it enters, moves, gathers, and disperses, becoming tone, noise, resonance, and silence. I imagine Pneuma as a beautiful white-noise machine—an immersive field of breath, air, harmonic resonance, and noise that surrounds and bathes the listener. At first, the sounds may seem formless, but gradually relationships emerge: harmonies, beating frequencies, unexpected moments of consonance, flashes of something luminous within the noise.
At the center of this field is the harmonium player, the Scallywag: flawed, resistant, and a little absurd, unsure what to do with what is being offered to him. Sometimes the Scallywag asks the winds to stop. So they stop. They do not argue or insist. They wait. And still, the breath returns. This gesture sits at the heart of the piece. The love imagined here does not force itself into the room or demand readiness or worthiness. It can be refused without disappearing; it can wait in silence. And when there is an opening, however small, it returns. The Scallywag is a character, but perhaps also something familiar: the part of us that longs to change yet resists change at the same time, the part that struggles to receive something it does not believe it has earned.
The world beyond this room can be frightening and uncertain. There are things we cannot protect one another from, and things we cannot always make sense of. Pneuma is a small attempt to imagine another possibility: a space where, for a little while, we can set some of that down; where we can be with one another without fear of judgment, and where nothing has to be proven before we can belong. A space where we can arrive imperfectly, resist, listen, breathe, and perhaps begin again. As the piece unfolds, the boundaries between the individual instruments gradually dissolve. What begins as resistance becomes listening; what begins as separation becomes participation. The piece does not ask us to become perfect. It asks what might happen if love remained present anyway. And still, the breath returns. For a while, we simply breathe together.
Players:
Joelle Simone Morales – bassoon
Jess Griggs – trombone
Josh Ronsen – clarinet
Andrew Stoltz – harmonium
Composer: Brent Fariss
Brent Fariss is a composer / performer living in Austin, Texas. He has collaborated in several modern music settings including the Goliath Was Bigfoot, Waco Girls, and the Austin New Music Coop. He has become increasingly interested in the idea of conceptualism; using minimalist techniques to unite texture, form, resonance, and abstracted programmatic ideas to create a musical environment.
https://brentfariss.bandcamp.com
This piece will open up the evening in the Learning Gallery at KMFA
6:30pm on Saturday, 10/10/2026
The Sarah Hennies & Tristan Kasten-Krause performance will follow in the Draylen Mason Music Studio at 7:30 PM.
Save your seat here via Ticketleap
Cash and Venmo also accepted on site.
