MoM3: At which point
June 18-19, 2021
**June 20th – new date due to 6/19 rain**
The Month of Moderns 2021
Presented by The Crossing and The Annenberg Center
MoM 3: At which point
a new work by Wang Lu, based on poetry of 2019 Pulitzer winner Forrest Gander
plus Shift, by Ayanna Woods; an expanded version of our 2020 commission
and the US premiere of David Lang's the sense of senses
Performances June 18-19 (June 20 due to rain)
a picnic atmosphere, safe and socially-distanced with the audience distanced in pods, surrounded – from afar – by the singers and Echoes
at Awbury Arboretum in Germantown
a seated performance (bring your chairs and blankets!)
on the rolling landscape of this historic estate
“At which point, coming to, I knew I’d pay the whole flag-pull fare. At which point the driver turned and said it doesn’t need to be your fault for it to break you.
At which point without any lurching commencement,
he began to play a vulture-bone flute.
At which point I grew old and it was like ripping open the beehive with my hands again. ”
Another new work: composed by Wang Lu for the specific scenario of our socially-distant, amplified performance. This premiere holds great promise for a journey of colors coming from Lu’s truly inspired and personal sound world, as she explores the emotional valleys and peaks of 2019 Pulitzer-winner Forrest Gander’s raw, brutally honest poetry.
Ayanna Woods’ words and music struck us with their power last November and stayed with us in such a way that we were inspired to ask her to expand her brief work Shift into a multi-movement suite based in her own words: “I want...a monument we grasp and heave and bend in a long arc/bursting through the cracks in the story you tell, America.” There is energy and rhythm and a drive upward toward...is it hope, or demand?
MoM 3 will close with the US premiere of David Lang's "the sense of senses," a co-commission of The Crossing, The Company of Music (Vienna), and the Fisher Center at Bard College. The work distills all the senses mentioned in the Song of Songs, rearranged by sense, so that all seen things are together, all heard things together, etc. They are then presented from far to near – sight to sound to smell to feeling to taste. The result is a growing intensity as the senses come closer – an apt reminder of the power of sense as we emerge from an era in which so much of that very-human connection has been absent.
Friday, June 18, 2021, 6:30pm
Saturday, June 19, 2021, 6:30pm
now Sunday June 20, 2021, 630pm
Tickets will be available May 11th
at www.annenbergcenter.org/
All concerts in The Month of Moderns 2021 are performed with singers and audience spatially distanced, using our Echoes Amplification Kits, which allow an intimate aural experience, while observing pandemic-time protocols.
Concert image – “Awbury Giraffe Mic Tree" (2021) by Steven Bradshaw and Joka