New works from Benjamin C.S. Boyle, Michael Gilbertson, and Kile Smith - collaborations with ICE, Prometheus, The National Gallery, Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and Northwestern University.

The journey continues. The works in our 2017-18 season look at voyages: through our lives, in our relationships, and across oceans. Storytelling - local and global.

Read on for more info, and go to crossingchoir.com for ticketing information.
with the strings of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE)

Friday and Saturday November 10 and 11 at 8pm @
The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
Sunday November 12 at 3:30pm @ The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Monday November 13 at 7pm @ The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

David Lang's the national anthems
Caroline Shaw's To the Hands
Ted Hearne's Consent

Caroline's 2016  Seven Responses study on displacement and immigration is balanced with David's meditation on the nature of national anthems:  "I had the idea that if I looked carefully at every national anthem I might be able to identify something that everyone in the world could agree on....Hiding in every national anthem is the recognition that we are insecure about our freedoms, that freedom is fragile, and delicate, and easy to lose."

i f you need our death
our blood, our heart, our soul
we are ready
Friday December 15 at 8pm @ Church of the Holy Trinity, Rittenhouse Square
presented by The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society
Sunday December 17 at 5pm @ The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Once a year we let Time stop outside in the Cold and spend an hour together looking inward with our annual meditative evening welcoming Winter. This December, we feature a new work of Michael Gilbertson as well as his 2015 Returning for double choir. Through the story of Jonathan and David, Returning contemplates how the past may live only as questions. Music and Silence. Dark and Light.

We offer two performances this year to accommodate last year's sold-out concert.

What knits us
to the soul of another
the way dusk light becomes
a part of darkness returning
Michael Gordon's Anonymous Man
our Chicago debut

Residency at the Bienen School of Music March 13-16
Concert Friday March 16 at 7.30pm @ Mary B. Galvin Recital Hall
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Michael Gordon's Anonymous Man (Midwest premiere)
Gabriel Jackson's Rigwreck (Midwest premiere)

Anonymous Man (premiered this past Saturday night; read the review here) is a concert-length work from Bang on a Can composer Michael Gordon. The text is drawn from real life-Gordon's experiences living in a changing neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, meeting his future wife (the composer Julia Wolfe), raising a family, and especially his encounters with two homeless men who lived across the street. The journey includes personal accounts of September 11, the death of one of the homeless men, and the outpouring of sympathy from the community following that loss, finally reaching an epiphany that evokes Lincoln's funeral train arriving on Desbrosses Street, the first stop on its visit to the streets of Manhattan. The interplay of personalities is beautifully rendered in music, springing from Michael's conversations with the homeless men-serious, funny, mysterious, poetic, and mundane.

With Gabriel Jackson's dramatic setting of Pierre Joris' poem - a study on the power of money -  Rigwreck ; for this virtuosic work, the Crossing is joined by the Bienen Contemporary/Early Vocal Ensemble (BCE).

This is the tale of two
One life inside, the other one, outside
with Prometheus Chamber Ensemble

Sunday June 17 at 4pm @ The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Benjamin C.S. Boyle's Voyages (world premiere)
Robert Convery's Voyages

We explore two stylistically diverse settings of one of the great poem cycles of the 20th century - Hart Crane's masterpiece, Voyages. Robert Convery's elegiac 1996 work is a poignant, mesmerizing artistic achievement. And, writing his fourth work for The Crossing, Benjamin C.S. Boyle probes the textures of strings and voices while pondering these haunting words. Voyages is a whirlwind of language and metaphor - a journey through love, founded in pure desire, concluding in isolation.

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.
Saturday June 30 at 8pm @ The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Kile Smith's For none would hear her (world premiere)

Though Kile Smith has written several uniquely idiomatic works for us, we have long awaited this concert-length unaccompanied evening of music, setting journal entries and poems of the enigmatic Robert Lax. Lax presents a fascinating aggregate of paradoxes: friend to Thomas Merton and the Beat poets; urbane yet reclusive; at times whimsical, at others blissful. He ultimately explored a kind of literary minimalism, playing with form as if reinventing it - surely a seductive invitation to any composer. Yet again an opportunity for us to consider words - ours, and those of others.

for we are only
going down,
only descending
by this song
to where the cities
gleam in the darkness,
or curled like roots
July 15-28 @ The Warren Miller Performing Arts Center, Big Sky, Montana

Five newly-composed works from the Composing Fellows of the Big Sky Choral Initative at The Big Sky Conservatory.

Our annual residency creating new works in the mountains of Montana, with an informal concert at 7pm Saturday July 21 at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center.

visit bigskyconservatory.org for updates and more information
The Odyssey: Book 12

Odysseus' voyage has lasted nearly two decades; his men long for Ithaca.

After a year on the witch-goddess Circe's island the crew sets sail and crosses to the edge of the ocean, anchoring in a harbor where Odysseus visits the spirits of the dead, including his mother who has died grieving over his long absence. Perilous sea adventures follow: Odysseus resists the temptations of the dangerously seductive singing of the Sirens and navigates between the sea monster Scylla and the whirlpools of Charybdis. Finally, while resting on the island of Helios, Odysseus' men disobey his orders to forego The Sun God's cattle. When they set sail, Zeus obliges Helios' demand for revenge with a terrible storm that leaves all but Odysseus dead.

The journey continues.

#desire #restraint #odyssey #home #crossingchoir
© 2017 Benoît Trimborn. All rights reserved.
Art used by kind permission of Benoit Trimborn and Hugo Galerie, New York.
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