2017-2018 Season Announcement

Join us for an exciting season featuring amazing works by George Crumb, Julius Eastman, Beat Furrer, György Ligeti, and a world premiere by Orlando Jacinto Garcia written for violist Melia Watras and Seattle Modern Orchestra. We’ll finish the season with a transcendental 50 minutes piece by Jonathan Harvey.

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CONCERT I: IN TIME OF WAR…

THURS. | OCT. 12 | 8 PM
Pre-concert presentation at 7:30 PM with SMO co-Artistic Director Jérémy Jolley
@ The Chapel Performance Space in the Good Shepherd Center (4th Floor)

PROGRAM:
George Crumb – Dream Sequence (Images II) for violin, cello, piano and percussion (1976)
George Crumb – Black Angels (Images I) for electric string quartet (1969)
Julius Eastman – Gay Guerrilla (1979) – Version for 13 strings

Seattle Modern Orchestra opens its 2017-18 season with a concert featuring American music from the 1970s. Composers George Crumb and Julius Eastman responded to the cultural and political turmoil of the ’70s with works that resonate with today’s conflicts. Crumb described his Black Angels, inspired by the Vietnam war, as a “parable on our troubled contemporary world,” portraying a “voyage of the soul” in three stages: Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation), and Return (redemption). Eastman viewed his minimalist work Gay Guerrilla as an “organic” work which “glorifies Gay” as a guerrilla – “someone, in any case, that is sacrificing his life for a point of view.”

CONCERT II: THE CLOUDS RECEDING

SAT. | APRIL 14 | 8 PM
Pre-concert conversation at 7:30 PM with guest composer Orlando Jacinto Garcia and SMO co-Artistic Director Jérémy Jolley
@The Chapel Performance Space in the Good Shepherd Center (4th Floor)

PROGRAM:
Beat Furrer – Aria for soprano and six instruments (1999) – West Coast Premiere
Orlando J. Garcia – the clouds receding into the mountains for viola and ensemble (2017) – World Premiere
György Ligeti – Melodien for chamber orchestra (1971) – Seattle Premiere

Seattle Modern Orchestra is pleased to host composer Orlando Jacinto Garcia with a new piece, the clouds receding into the mountains, written for violist and University of Washington faculty Melia Watras and SMO. The title refers to both the spectacular cloud formations as well as the continually receding aural materials heard throughout the work. The concert also features Swiss composer Beat Furrer‘s Aria and Melodien for chamber orchestra by the 20th century master, György Ligeti.

CONCERT III: IN QUEST OF SPIRIT – HARVEY’S BHAKTI
SAT. | JUNE 9 | 8 PM
Pre-concert presentation at 7:30 PM with SMO co-Artistic Director Jérémy Jolley
@The Chapel Performance Space in the Good Shepherd Center (4th Floor)

PROGRAM:
Jonathan Harvey: Bhakti for chamber ensemble and quadraphonic tape (1982) – West Coast Premiere

For its season finale concert, Seattle Modern Orchestra is thrilled to perform British composer Jonathan Harvey’s 50 minutes epic work Bhakti (devotion), centered around Sanskrit hymns from the Rigveda toward a transcendent consciousness. The ensemble and tape are engaged in “dialogue, transformation, memory, anticipation, simultaneous translation, and reaching beyond the instrumental scale to a more universal dimension.”

Seattle Modern Orchestra is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike.