The Crossing @ Christmas

Caroline Shaw and Mason Bates
w/ Scott Dettra, organ

Sunday, December 18 @ 5pm

The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia

The air is what transmits the message.
A miracle.
My voice travels to the Indies, which took my daughter weeks to reach on a steamboat.
Nothing is further apart than the straits that separate us.
In this way the world grows closer and closer,
even as we move further apart.

– adapted from Hallo Bandeong, hier Den Jaag! (trans. Jerry Chu), in Mason Bates’ Mass Transmission

Caroline Shaw's new work, Ochre, one in a series of recent works relating to soil, "obliquely references how we consider and care for the ground beneath our feet – our Earth, our sense of the scale of our lives in the context of geological history," framed in an exploration of the sensation of music as color. Focusing primarily on timbres and vowels, it draws on fragments of poetry framing human existence with metaphors of geologic time, iron ore, and rock; Goethe, for whom a common mineral in ochres is named; and a lament of Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez. Essentially mournful, “Ochre” maintains a sense of joy and wonder regarding our planet.

Mason Bates’ Mass Transmission, with Scott Dettra at the organ and sound design by Paul Vazquez, explores how the advent of radio technology brought us closer, yet magnified our distances and loneliness, drawing on early radio-wave communications between parents in the Netherlands and their children on Java, sent there to work for the Dutch government. 

Cultivate / Curate: our children, our earth, our world, our ochre.
Colorful, innovative, original, and heart-wrenching.

Caroline Shaw’s new work is commissioned for The Crossing, Cantori New York, Notre Dame Vocale, and Volti with funding provided by the Ann Stookey Fund for New Music.

Photo: tree farm