Hello to you, SF Girls Chorus friends, from back home in New York City……where I am finishing up a two-week North American tour with a superb group of musicians from France, Ensemble Variances. It’s their first American tour, and I have been proud to show them around some cities I have gotten to know pretty well in my travels—Vancouver, Seattle, Atlanta, and now my dear home, NYC. We are touring with a program that we toured all over France last season, Cri selon cri, which translates (roughly), “Cry by cry.” This is a new concept in concert curating that seems to be more common in Europe but is beginning to make its way here: a musical group will choose an evocative theme, find existing pieces that seem to comment on that theme and commission composers to write new works with the theme specifically in mind. They asked me to write on the idea of “The Cry… as the expression of a basic language shared by all human beings as well as a majority of animals.”
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