The Crossing: Crickets in our Backyard
TBA
- Claire Chase, flute
Wang Lu — At Which Point (Claire Chase, flute)
Tania León — Singsong (world premiere)
Three-time Grammy Award-winning choir The Crossing kicks off its 2023-2024 season with Crickets in our Backyard on Saturday, September 16, 2023 at 7pm at The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill. On Monday, September 18, 2023, at 7:30pm, The Crossing takes this program to Battell Chapel as part of the choir’s residency at Yale University, and then to Paine Hall on Thursday, September 21, 2023, at 7pm as part of the choir's residency at Harvard University.
U.S. Poet Laureate and 1987 Pulitzer winner Rita Dove has been describing our world in language that pulls back the curtain on how we love and gives breathtaking testimony to violence. Her words are set to music by 2021 Pulitzer winner Tania León in a new work for MacArthur Fellow Claire Chase and The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally. The work promises relevance, virtuosity, and a lasting life as a significant addition to the canon of new music commissioned by The Crossing. Also on the program is a substantial new work from Ayanna Woods, the culminating project of her year-long position as The Crossing's first Resident Composer, as well as the reprise of Wang Lu's At Which Point, composed in the depths of the pandemic, setting a devastatingly truthful rumination on being left behind by 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander.
About The Crossing
The Crossing is a Grammy Award-winning professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for choir that explore and expand ways of writing for choir, singing in choir, and listening to music for choir. Many of its nearly 150 commissioned premieres address social, environmental, and political issues.
The Crossing collaborates with some of the world’s most accomplished ensembles and artists, including the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, Network for New Music, Lyric Fest, Piffaro, Beth Morrison Projects, Allora & Calzadilla, Bang on a Can, Klockriketeatern, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Similarly, The Crossing often collaborates with some of world’s most prestigious venues and presenters, such as the Park Avenue Armory, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, National Sawdust, David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Haarlem Choral Biennale in The Netherlands, The Finnish National Opera in Helsinki, The Kennedy Center in Washington, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space in New York, Winter Garden with WNYC, and Duke, Northwestern, Colgate, and Notre Dame Universities. The Crossing holds an annual residency at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Montana.
With a commitment to recording its commissions, The Crossing has issued 27 releases, receiving two GRAMMY® Awards for Best Choral Performance (2018, 2019), and seven Grammy nominations. The Crossing, with Donald Nally, was the American Composers Forum’s 2017 Champion of New Music. They were the recipients of the 2015 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence, three ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, and the Dale Warland Singers Commission Award from Chorus America.
Recently, The Crossing has expanded its choral presentation to film, working with Four/Ten Media, in-house sound designer Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services, visual artists Brett Snodgrass and Steven Bradshaw, and composers David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Paul Fowler on live and animated versions of new and existing works. Lang’s protect yourself from infection and in nature as well as Paul Fowler’s Obligations, based on a poem of Layli Long Soldier, were specifically created to be within the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Crossing’s pandemic response daily series, Rising w/ The Crossing, a series of 72 live performances with notes by Nally, has been archived by the Library of Congress as “an important part of the collection and the historical record.”
The Crossing is represented by Alliance Artist Management. All of its concerts are broadcast on WRTI, Philadelphia’s Classical and Jazz public radio station. Learn more at www.crossingchoir.org.
http://www.crossingchoir.org