"The Story of Music, Stories from Home"

Poet/essayist Gary Holthaus and musician Lauren Pelon are teaming up to perform the program The Story of Music, Stories from Home.

Tickets are now available for purchase at the Historic Courthouse and will also be for sale at the door on the day of the performance. For additional information, please feel free to call (651) 275-7077.

The following is an excerpt from a Washington County Press Release;

Pelon plays a variety of ancient and modern instruments ranging from lute, lyre, and concertina, to recorders, gemshorn, electric wind controller and pedalboard. Holthaus reads from his poems and essays. Both the music and the readings offer unique perceptions of the natural world, and celebrate a sense of place, community, and home.

Lauren Pelon is a 2011 recipient of an Arts Tour Minnesota grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is funded, in part, by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the Legacy Amendment vote of the people of Minnesota Nov. 4, 2008.

Pelon has performed throughout the United States and in China, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Russia, Kazakhstan, Australia, and New Zealand. She is noted for her versatile use of an array of instruments, but Pelon has also won recognition for her lovely soprano voice, and for her compelling compositions and arrangements of music from many countries and cultures. Pelon has performed with symphony orchestras, The Philadelphia String Quartet, on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” and at the Russian Institute for the History of the Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia. She was the recipient of the 2001 “Artist of the Year” award from the Southeast Minnesota Arts Council, and 2010 Artist Initiative Award from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Holthaus has three books of poems, three chapbooks, and three collections of essays, all of them rooted in the earth and the idea of community or home. Holthaus’ poems have been published in the United States, Egypt, and Iraq (in Arabic). He received a 1990 National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship for Poetry, and his prose was cited in “Notable Essays” in 1994 and 1998. Holthaus recently worked with the Experiment in Rural Cooperation to write "From the Farm to the Table, What All Americans Need to Know about Agriculture," a book on farming in the upper Midwest. He has worked for Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture Society, with the Island Institute on issues of sustainability in Sitka, Alaska, and with the Pepperfield Project in Decorah, Iowa.