In the interest of connecting contemporary classical music to something larger that encompasses all members of the human race, the City of Tomorrow will embark on a three-year venture to create a three-CD concept album that connects our personal relationships with nature, technology, and the idea of apocalypse.
The first album, NATURE (Fall 2014), will include music inspired by themes of the natural world: dazzling beauty in infinite variation, dependence and interdependence, the susceptibility of our bodies to our environment and to the natural flow of time. Works will include Luciano Berio’s ricorrenze and Denys Bouliane’s ...A Certain Chinese Cyclopaedia.
The second album, MACHINES (Fall of 2015), will describe industry, technology and its effect on humans and society. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Rotary and Arabesques by Magnus Lindberg will be among the works on this second disc.
The final album, THE APOCALYPTIC SUBLIME, will focus on the problems that our technology creates in the natural world (pollution, habitat destruction, space junk) and how they are juxtaposed with the ways nature fights back (hurricanes and extreme weather, holes in the ozone, animals living in abandoned buildings). The result is awe, fear, and transcendence--in other words, the apocalyptic Sublime: beauty in destruction and collapse.
Each album will include a new work for wind quintet that we have commissioned from young American composers Nat Evans, John Aylward, and Hannah Lash. This will not only be a recording project -- these three programs will shape our seasons for the next three years, giving this music the chance to be heard as we tour throughout the country.
In order to make this vision come alive, the City of Tomorrow needs your support. The total cost of producing these three recordings is more than $50,000. A part of that will be funded by grants, corporate support and sales. The quintet’s goal is to raise $10,000 in individual donations by April of 2014 to fund the first segment of this album. Help us construct this project and inspire audiences to think about these themes in new ways. Be a part of making contemporary wind chamber music a significant medium of expression and change.
