Program Notes: Modern Sanctuary
SoundBox curator MISSY MAZZOLI offers these comments on
Modern Sanctuary:
Tonight’s concert is a series of musical rituals for our modern age. The featured composers have created sacred sonic spaces, often inventing their own musical styles of prayer, meditation and communion.
We move from darkness into light over the course of the evening, beginning with the vulnerable breathiness of Marcos Balter’s solo work Ut(2005) and the haunted words of Oakland-based poet Matthew Zapruder in an excerpt from Missy Mazzoli’s Vespers for a New Dark Age (2015).
We taste the strange ecstasy of Meredith Monk’s Passage and What Does It Mean? (2006) and the luminous, synth-drenched world of Mario Diaz De Leon’s Sacrament (2019) and Sanctuary (2017), before finally moving to shimmering, enveloping works by John Luther Adams and Arvo Pärt.
Guiding us on our journey is musical shaman Lorna Dune, who not only presents ambient selections and ambisonic nature samples that swim through the 85-speaker Meyer Constellation System during intermissions, but also premieres her imaginative remixes of other works on the program.
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