MoM2: Unhistoric Acts

The Month of Moderns 2022

w/ JACK Quartet

Chaya Czernowin, Unhistoric Acts (US premiere)
Tawnie Olson, Beloved of the Sky (world premiere)

This concert is canceled – we will perform Tawnie Olson’s Beloved of the Sky on July 8th at MoM3, and we are working to find a time to reschedule Chaya Czernowin’s Unhistoric Acts w/ JACK Quartet.

Saturday, June 25, 2022
@ 5pm
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia

Pre-concert talk with Donald, Chaya, and Tawnie @ 4pm in the Burleigh Cruikshank Memorial Chapel

Post-concert reception in 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.

For you who first uttered all these words
if you call on me, I will gladly bear your burdens.
I will carry them, as if carrying the burdens of the apostles.
Say goodbye. For we are all merely orphans.

Tawnie Olson continues a theme from MoM1 – the exploration of color – with her settings of Canadian artist Emily Carr’s journals, a set of highly-concentrated cameos of this lonely, eccentric artist who wrote words to affirm her value in the face of hurt and misunderstanding. Words and paint seem to intermingle in Tawnie’s translation of Carr’s ideas into musical vignettes. JACK Quartet then joins us for Unhistoric Acts, Chaya Czernowin’s titanic synthesis of disparate quotations born of the pandemic. In Chaya’s bold musical strokes there are worlds of outrage, fear, intimacy, and defiance, as she examines George Eliott’s aphorism, “for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”

Beloved of the Sky is commissioned for The Crossing, Seraphic Fire, and Brigham Young University by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University.