MOR’s Free Outreach Concert Also Showcases Work by Seattle Composer Daniel Asia

SEATTLE, WA—March 24, 2009—Music of Remembrance’s (MOR) free Sparks of Glory outreach series concludes its fourth season on Saturday, April 18, 2009. The free-to-the-public concert, Different Trains, featuring Steve Reich’s landmark work and a song cycle by Seattle native Daniel Asia, will be performed at 2:00 p.m. in the Chapel Performance Space in Wallingford’s Good Shepherd Center.

 

“Thanks to support from the NEA, this season we have focused on performing Holocaust-related works by American composers—MOR commissions and other milestone works, such as Different Trains,” says MOR Artistic Director Mina Miller. “It’s also been wonderful to see how quickly and warmly Wallingford has welcomed MOR at the Good Shepherd Center.” As usual at the 90-minute Saturday afternoon performances, Miller (an international speaker on musicians’ spiritual resistance during the Holocaust) will introduce the musical works and their composers, and offer social and historical contexts for the pieces.

 

Each composer brings an American perspective to being Jewish in a post-Holocaust world. For New Yorker Reich, his inspiration came from the years 1939 to 1942, when, following the divorce of his parents, he (and a governess) traveled regularly by train between New York and Los Angeles. Reich recalls, “While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains.”

 

To create his now-acclaimed piece, Reich interviewed two people: his governess, Virginia, and a retired Pullman porter, Lawrence Davis, who used to work the lines between New York and Los Angeles; selected the recorded testimonies of three Holocaust survivors, all about his age; and collected American and European train sounds from that era. Then, remarkably, he notated excerpts of the recorded speech musically. Three separate string quartets are on a pre-recorded tape, and will “join” the live MOR ensemble.

 

Daniel Asia was born in Seattle in 1953, and currently heads the composition department at the University of Arizona. His song cycle Breath in a Ram’s Horn sets five poems by the writer and poet Paul Pines: “What do we know?” “Old Medals Prayer Shawls,” “Job Longed for the Grave,” “Yom Kippur,” and “My Father’s Name.” Tenor Ross Hauck, who appeared in MOR’s 2006 production of Brundibár, is the vocalist.

 

Asia first met Pines at the MacDowell Colony, an artist’s retreat in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and ended up writing several works based on his poetry, one of which is Breath in a Ram’s Horn. Asia notes: “The poems in this cycle are imbued with images of family and Judaism, and their intertwining. One finds memories of the poet’s father, mother, and grandfather; memories of prayer shawls, phylacteries, praying; imagery of the High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and the power of recollection; and a reflection on Job and David.”

 

MOR’s education and outreach series, created to bring chamber music to various Seattle communities, is supported this season by an award from Chamber Music America and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts’ American Masterpieces program, specifically dedicated to MOR’s performances of works by American composers in response to the Holocaust.

 

Different Trains
2:00 p.m., Saturday, April 18, 2009
Good Shepherd Center (Chapel Performance Space, 4th Floor)
4649 Sunnyside Ave N, Seattle

 

Daniel Asia
Breath in a Ram’s Horn

 

Steve Reich
Different Trains

 

Elisa Barston, violin; Walter Gray, cello; Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola; Ross Hauck, tenor; Mina Miller, piano; Mikhail Shmidt, violin

 

*This series is made possible, in part, by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts’ American Masterpieces program. Music of Remembrance is the recipient of a Chamber Music America Residency Partnership Program Grant with funding provided by the CMA Residency Endowment Fund.