MoM1: The Books of Color and of Never

The Month of Moderns 2022

Marcos Balter, The Book of Colors (world premiere)
Aaron Helgeson, The Book of Never (world premiere)
Gabriel Jackson, Darest thou now O Soul (world premiere)

Saturday, June 11, 2022
@ 7pm
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia

Pre-concert talk with Donald and Aaron @ 6pm in the Burleigh Cruikshank Memorial Chapel

Post-concert reception on the front lawn of the church.

Please Note: proof of vaccination is required to attend The Month of Moderns 2022; vaccine cards will be checked prior to entry into the concert. In accordance with city and PCCH guidelines, masks are optional, but encouraged.

I once went to China on a Cruise ship.
Eight hundred of us got off the ship wearing white,
because it feels festive and shippy and says,
“I’m on a cruise.”
In China white is the color of mourning.
We looked insane.

Marcos Balter’s The Book of Colors explores the historical, philosophical, social, and cultural ways we interact with and understand colors. The work engages coloristic aspects of vocal music as a door into historic symbolisms relating to identity, cultural appropriations and misappropriations, synesthesia, astronomy.

History also lies deep in the origins of Aaron Helgeson’s monumental The Book of Never, a fascinating adaptation of the Novgorod Codex, a wooden book of psalms from 999 believed to be owned by a monk sent to convert the village of Novgorod from Paganism to Orthodox Christianity. After his excommunication, the monk focused on preserving history of the village through writing and overwriting many layers in the Codex, a technique that Aaron masters musically as he overlays these ancient texts of Novgorod with 20th-century liberal writers Wilde, Neruda, Stein, Angela Davis, and Thanhha Lai.

Novgorod was a town in what is now Ukraine. It is a sad irony of art being life that the work is born out of an authoritarian overlord, The Church, attempting to take over another land; in its failure to do so, it instead attempts to annihilate it, its people, and its culture. A concert that leaves us pondering the ingenuity and complexity of humans as we reflect on “how we got to this moment.”

Finally, a new work from Gabriel Jackson, who celebrates our long-time collaborative relationship with Darest thou now O Soul, a Whitman setting, written as a birthday gift to Donald; It draws on ‘everything we’ve got’ – virtuosic, insightful, acrobatic, and a hell of a lot of fun – a fitting, rowdy, triumphal close for our return to The Month of Moderns.

The Book of Never is commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University