Zeitgeist is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 contemporary classical music

Contemporary classical music

Contemporary classical music can be understood as belonging to the period that started in the mid-1970s with the retreat of modernism. However, the term may also be employed in a broader sense to refer to all post-1945 modern musical forms.-Categorization:...

 group based in Saint Paul

Saint Paul, Minnesota

Saint Paul is the capital and second-most populous city of the U.S. state of Minnesota. The city lies mostly on the east bank of the Mississippi River in the area surrounding its point of confluence with the Minnesota River, and adjoins Minneapolis, the state's largest city...

, Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

. It was founded in 1977.

Its instrumentation includes two percussion, piano, and woodwinds. The group has worked with and commissioned numerous composers, including John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

, Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono

is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...

, La Monte Young

La Monte Young

La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...

, Frederic Rzewski

Frederic Rzewski

Frederic Anthony Rzewski is an American composer and virtuoso pianist.- Biography :Rzewski began playing piano at age 5. He attended Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Milton Babbitt...

, Paul Dresher

Paul Dresher

Paul Joseph Dresher is an American composer. Dresher received his B.A. in music from the University of California, Berkeley and his M.A. in composition from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with Robert Erickson, Roger Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, and Bernard Rands.He also...

, Terry Riley

Terry Riley

Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...

, Anthony Gatto

Anthony Gatto (composer)

Anthony Gatto is an American composer of music for theater, dance, film, opera, and concert music. He is also the founder of The Festival Dancing in Your Head. His quintet for guitar and string quartet "Black Dog/Lucky Dog" was performed by the new-music string quartet Ethel with Mark Stewart...

, Jin Hi Kim

Jin Hi Kim

Kim Jin-Hi is a geomungo player and composer.She is known for introducing the geomungo to the wider world through her contemporary chamber and orchestral compositions and large-scale multimedia pieces, as well as her extensive work in avant-garde and cross-cultural free...

, Eric Stokes, Harold Budd

Harold Budd

Harold Budd is an American ambient/avant-garde composer and poet. Born in Los Angeles, he was raised in the Mojave Desert, and was inspired at an early age by the humming tone caused by wind blown across telephone wires....

, Daniel Lentz

Daniel Lentz

Daniel Lentz , Latrobe, Pennsylvania, is an electronic Western classical-music composer.Daniel Lentz achieved much fame as a musician while quite young—when he was still a student at Brandeis University he was awarded a fellowship in composition at Tanglewood in the summer of 1966...

, Barbara Benary

Barbara Benary

Barbara Benary is an American composer and ethnomusicologist specializing in Indonesian and Indian music.In 1976 she co-founded Gamelan Son of Lion with Philip Corner and Daniel Goode; she also constructed most of the group's instruments...

, Fred Ho

Fred Ho

Fred Ho is an American jazz baritone saxophonist, composer, bandleader, playwright, writer, and social activist....

, Martin Bresnick

Martin Bresnick

Martin Bresnick is a composer of contemporary classical music, film scores and experimental music.-Education and early career:Bresnick was born and raised in the Bronx, and is a graduate of New York City's specialized High School of Music and Art. He was educated at the University of Hartford ,...

, Homer Lambrecht, Brent Michael Davids

Brent Michael Davids

Brent Michael Davids is an American composer and flautist. He is a member of the Stockbridge Mohican nation of American Indians. He has composed for Zeitgeist, the Kronos Quartet, Joffrey Ballet, the National Symphony Orchestra, and Chanticleer.He holds a B.M...

, Jack Vees, Pierre Jalbert

Pierre Jalbert

Pierre Jalbert is a Canadian skier, actor, and motion picture film and sound editor.He was christened Joseph Jacques Pierre-Paul Jalbert in Quebec City, Canada, the son of a newspaperman...

, Arthur Jarvinen, Scott Lindroth

Scott Lindroth

Scott Lindroth is an American composer and teacher currently based near Durham, North Carolina.Lindroth joined the faculty of Duke University in 1990, where he is currently the Vice-Provost for the Arts and the Kevin D. Gorter Associate Professor of Music; his colleagues at Duke include composers...

, Mark Applebaum

Mark Applebaum

Mark Applebaum is an American composer and professor teaching at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in composition from the University of California at San Diego where he studied with Brian Ferneyhough, Joji Yuasa, Rand Steiger, and Roger Reynolds...

, and Beth Custer.

Discography

• 1993 - If Tigers Were Clouds. Innova.
• 1994 - Intuitive Leaps: Zeitgeist plays Terry Riley. Sony Music Entertainment.
• 1995 - A Decade: Zeitgeist Plays Rzewski. O.O. Discs.