David Shapiro, Sumptuous Planet: A Secular Mass (world premiere)
Tawnie Olson, Beloved of the Sky (world premiere)
Friday, July 8, 2022 @ 7pm
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia
Pre-concert talk with Donald, Tawnie, and David @ 6pm in the Burleigh Cruikshank Memorial Chapel
Post-concert reception on the front lawn of the church.
Please Note: proof of vaccination is required to attend The Month of Moderns 2022; vaccine cards will be checked prior to entry into the concert. In accordance with city and PCCH guidelines, masks are optional, but encouraged.
* * *
“My eyes are … wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how … natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.”
An expression of belief about the nature of life, and the joy we can find in understanding it, told through Richard Dawkins’ decidedly secular world view, paradoxically organized by David in the shape of a Christian Mass. Sumptuous Planet: A Secular Mass captures the famed biologist’s thoughts on the magnificence and staggering beauty of nature, as well as its utter indifference to our presence here. David’s musical world is one of anticipation and question – there is always another dimension we are invited to consider, to expect, to seek. Here, a Kyrie that reads, “If there is mercy in nature, it is accidental” and a Gloria follows: “Nature is a magnificent structure.”
Postponed from MoM 2 (nothing but an idea in our memories), Tawnie Olson’s Beloved of the Sky receives its world premiere. Setting excerpts from Canadian artist Emily Carr’s journals, Tawnie has created a series of vignettes in which words and paint seem to intermingle, capturing Carr’s ideas on creating, aging, juxtapositions, and loneliness.
#ComeHearNow