Name: The Crossing: "Crickets in our Backyard"
Start: 2023-09-21T19:30:00-04:00
Location: Paine Hall

The Crossing: "Crickets in our Backyard"

Harvard University Music Department

The Crossing performs works by Ayanna Woods, Wang Lu, and Tania León.

Paine Hall

U.S. Poet Laureate and 1987 Pulitzer winner Rita Dove has been describing our world in language that pulls back the curtain on how we love and gives breathtaking testimony to violence. Her words are set to music by 2021 Pulitzer winner Tania León in a new work for MacArthur Fellow Claire Chase and The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally. The work promises relevance, virtuosity, and a lasting life as a significant addition to the canon of new music commissioned by The Crossing. Also on the program is a substantial new work from Ayanna Woods, the culminating project of her year-long position as The Crossing&#x27;s first Resident Composer, as well as the reprise of Wang Lu’s At Which Point, composed in the depths of the pandemic, setting a devastatingly truthful rumination on being left behind by 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander.P﻿rogramA﻿YANNA WOODS, Infinite BodyW﻿ANG LU, At Which PointT﻿ANIA LEÓN, Singsong* (with Claire Chase)*﻿From the poem &quot;To Number our Days&quot;Biographies:The Crossing is a 24-voice professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for choir that explore and expand ways of writing for choir, singing in choir, and listening to music for choir. Many of its nearly 160 commissioned premieres address social, environmental, and political issues. With a commitment to recording its commissions, The Crossing has issued 29 releases, receiving three Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance (2018, 2019, 2023), and nine Grammy nominations. Pulitzer-Prize winning composer Tania León is highly regarded as a composer, conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations. In 2022, she was named a recipient of the 45th Annual Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime artistic achievements as well as Harvard’s 2022 Luise Vosgerchian Teaching Award. Most recently, the London Philharmonic Orchestra announced Tania León as next Composer-in-Residence – a post she will hold for two seasons, beginning in September 2023. Ayanna Woods is a Grammy-nominated performer, composer and bandleader from Chicago. Her music explores the spaces between acoustic and electronic, traditional and esoteric, wildly improvisational and mathematically rigorous. A collaborator across genres and forms, her work spans new music, theater, film scoring, arranging, songwriting, and improvisation. As a gigging musician, she is a sought-after bassist, singer, and improvisor.Composer and pianist Wang Lu writes music that reflects a very natural identification with influences from urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, traditional Chinese music and freely improvised traditions, through the prism of contemporary instrumental techniques and new sonic possibilities. She is currently an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University, after receiving her doctoral degree in composition at Columbia University and graduating from the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music.Professor of the Practice Claire Chase is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, Chase has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists, and in 2013 launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036.. Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Chase is currently Professor of the Practice of Music at Harvard University’s Department of Music, a Creative Associate at The Juilliard School, and a Collaborative Partner with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony. She is the Debs Creative Chair at Carnegie Hall for the 2022-23 season.F﻿ree parking will be available at the Broadway Garage.(I﻿mage: Steven Bradshaw)

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The Crossing: "Crickets in our Backyard"

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The Crossing: "Crickets in our Backyard"

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