MoM: The Arc in the Sky
Saturday, June 30 at 8pm
The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
8855 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19118
Pre-concert talk with Donald and the composer at 7pm in the Burleigh Cruikshank Memorial Chapel
Kile Smith's The Arc in the Sky (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
sit waiting
at the undiscovered
pool.
© 2017 Benoît Trimborn. All rights reserved.
Art used by kind permission of Benoit Trimborn and Hugo Galerie, New York.
https://www.hugogalerie.com/