At Which Point
A New Concert Film
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"I can see you
I can hear the birds
I can hear you"
Last June, we concluded our Month of Moderns festival in a meadow nestled among the trees of Awbury Arboretum in Germantown. The Crossing’s singers encircle the sloping hillside which was dotted with lawn chairs, blankets, picnic baskets, and friends gathering for the first time, following a season dominated by at-home recordings and animated videos. MoM3: At Which Point, presented by Penn Live Arts, marked our return to coordinated, live singing – getting ever-closer to conventional, acoustic choral singing – assisted by our Echoes Amplification Kits. Today we relive that moment with the release of the concert film, captured by Four/Ten Media with audio by The Crossing's sound designer Paul Vazquez (the mastermind behind our Echoes kits).
Three premieres, heard in the quiet seclusion of the Arboretum’s wooded sanctuary, an oasis in the middle of the city. Wang Lu's colorful and evocative At Which Point, explores the emotional valleys and peaks of 2019 Pulitzer-winner Forrest Gander's raw, brutally honest poetry. Lu’s work was conceived for this setting and blends seamlessly with the rustling of leaves and birdsong. Two movements of Ayanna Woods' SHIFT (this concert marking the premiere of the first movement, Refrain) offer energetic, rhythmic contrast in its upward drive towards hope and demand – the work has quickly become a staple of our repertoire. And the US premiere of David Lang's the sense of senses, in which David distills the Song of Songs into sensual categories, growing in intensity as we move from sight to sound, and from smell to taste – each sense bringing us closer and closer to one another. An apt reminder of a time and a place of emerging, Summer 2021, and an invitation to consider our upcoming, indoor Month of Moderns 2022 festival and the unexpected beauty that a conventional setting for choral singing offers!
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The Month of Moderns 2022
The Month of Moderns 2022 moves inside and back home, with five substantial premieres from today's most reflective, creative compositional voices: Chaya Czernowin, Aaron Helgeson, Marcos Balter, Tawnie Olson, and David Shapiro. In wildly diverse compositional styles, they explore the ideas of equally wide-ranging thinkers, from Gertrude Stein to Emily Carr, and to Richard Dawkins...musical worlds where Pablo Neruda meets The Rolling Stones and Angela Davis is set next to a 10th-century Ukrainian monk. Prismatic works about books, people, histories, and color.
MoM1:
THE BOOKS OF COLOR AND OF NEVER
Saturday, June 11 @ 7pm
The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia
MoM2:
UNHISTORIC ACTS
w/ JACK Quartet
Saturday, June 25, 2022 @ 5pm
The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia
MoM3:
THE BOOK OF DAWKINS SONGS
Friday, July 8, 2022 @ 7pm
The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia
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The Month of Moderns 3: At Which Point
presented by The Crossing & Penn Live Arts
concert film captured June 20, 2021
Video by Four/Ten Media
Audio by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services
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left to right: Ayanna Woods, Forrest Gander, Wang Lu, David Lang, and Donald Nally
Photo by Kevin Vondrak
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New music only happens through your support. |
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