The Blue Hour

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The Blue Hour

A collaborative song cycle for voice and string orchestra

 

Composed by
Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, and Sarah Kirkland Snider

Set to excerpts from Carolyn Forché’s poem On Earth

Duration: 70 mins

 

Program Note by Alex Fortes
One way that humans strive to control uncontrollable realities such as death is by imposing arbitrary rules and structures on the chaotic and inevitable. Another is by participating in the difficult but necessary act of being active members of a community or communities. The Blue Hour, in its conception, its process, and its content, lives and breathes these paradoxes. The work is an ambitious collaboration between five composers (Rachel Grimes, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, and Caroline Shaw). 

The work uses as its text Carolyn Forché's poem, "On Earth," which catalogs the scattered thoughts, visions, and imagery of a life passing ever closer to death, organized through the objective but arbitrary tool of alphabetization. This explicitly rationalized poetic form simultaneously evokes cold modernism and its ancient predecessors in biblical and gnostic abecedaries. The music that sets the poem draws similarly from an eclectic set of influences, at times setting the text quite literally (as with explicit references to Bach and settings that evoke plainchant and Renaissance polyphony), and at times using extended string techniques to create kaleidoscopic sound-paintings of Forché's moments of fantastical, jarring imagery. The work also gleams with power ballads — unapologetic lyricism and no-nonsense songwriting that is often associated with contemporary non-classical genres but which here contributes to the intimacy and universality of the subject matter. The various movements, each entirely written by one of the composers, access the personal vernaculars and interests of each composer as they pass through the ordered but nonlinear narrative of Forché's poem, contributing to the scope and scale of the work and its underlying subjects.

When the five composers and members of A Far Cry sat down for a meeting in the summer of 2016 about the possibility of bringing this song cycle to life, the group discussed in depth what justification there was for attempting a collaboration on such a scale for such a deeply personal work. As collaborators shared their own takes on the meaningful urgency of the project, the following statement took hold as a sort of "mission statement:"

In a time when we are seeing masses of people dehumanized — by war, displacement, poverty — we are looking here at a single life, the beautiful detail of one human existence. There is something precious in that; that through our sense of empathy with this one individual, we are given a lens through which to see our own world with greater clarity.

— Alex Fortes

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ARTISTS

Kelly Corcoran, Conductor 

Timbre Cierpke, Voice

Annaliese Kowert, Violin

Esther McMahon, Violin

Joe Christianson, Violin

Kameron Myers, Violin

Maggie Kassinger, Violin

Zoya Leybin, Violin

Laura Epling, Violin

Carl Larson, Viola

Sarah Cote, Viola

Michael Holub, Viola

Kaitlyn Raitz, Cello

Bryan Hayslett, Cello

Quentin Flowers, Bass

Ethan Jodziewicz, Bass

​Additional String Players To Be Announced