Half-Crossed/Pre-Election
A chamber ensemble from The Crossing
At the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
John Cage: Hymns and Variations
Ted Hearne: Privilege
Ted Hearne: Ripple
David Lang: Statement to the Court
In 1940, in a new introduction to his play “A Time of Your Life,” William Saroyan wrote: “We have always believed that art should be one thing, religion one thing, politics one thing, morality one thing, and so on. This kind of isolation of entities, while convenient, is I believe, foolish. All things must come together as one, which is man.” So, on the eve of an important election, we offer Americana, Two recent works of Ted Hearne on themes of contemporary American life – of modern media, privilege, destitution, and war – and an encore performance of a work by Ted’s teacher, Pulitzer laureate David Lang’s Statement to the Court, a dramatic setting of a time-honored speech by socialist Eugene Debs (a work written for The Crossing in 2010). We will then look back at one of the last century’s most influential American artists as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, John Cage’s half-hour, rarely heard Hymns and Variations was a seminal work in his method of “harmonic subtraction,” which, from our perspective, sounds like our earliest minimalist style – starkly beautiful music and based on two hymns of Early-American composer William Billings.
