"All New - All Local"
Saturday, February 4, 2012 at 8:00pm
San Francisco Conservatory Recital Hall
50 Oak St., San Francisco
Featuring four new works by Bay Area composers, receiving their local premieres:
David Conte: The Nine Muses with text by John Sterling Walker
Peter Scott Lewis: The Changing Light sets three poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Sanford Dole: Gertrude and Alice songs from a work in progress about the lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas with text by Brad Erickson
Michael Kaulkin: Waiting... sets various poetry by Elisabeth Eliassen
All of the works on this program employ various combinations of voice, strings, piano and percussion.
Tickets available at the the door.
This is a wonderful opportunity to hear a varied program of new chamber music for voices and instruments. There are some truly exquisite moments on this varied program of works by Bay Area composers.
Music is a powerful communal event, one intended to draw an audience into a singular experience, where we might well be entrained, whether by the rhythms or by tonal elegance, to join our minds and bodies in a similar emotive idea. Aristotle said it in this way:
Music directly imitates the passions or states of the soul...when one listens to music that imitates a certain passion, he becomes imbued with the same passion; and if over a long time he habitually listens to music that rouses ignoble passions, his whole character will be shaped to an ignoble form.
Socrates expressed this about the power of music:
Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful.
Plato knew music to be powerful and even dangerous:
Any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state, and ought to be prohibited. When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them.
Even though Plato knew that music has the potential to spark revolution, he admitted that:
Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.
So, I ask: How will you respond to the hearing of these new works? What will you take away with you, as you depart into the night after this concert? What will you share with your fellow concert-goers or talk about in the coming days?
How will you be changed?
