What Should I Do?
The Month of Moderns 2025
Gavin Bryars’ The Last Days of Immanuel Kant (World premiere)
Saturday June 14, 5pm
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia
We reunite with Gavin Bryars to celebrate the composer's ninth decade with a concert-length work that crowns our long history of collaborations. Gavin will set excerpts from Thomas De Quincey's entertaining, sorrowful, and often humorous essay The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, which touches on the universal topics of aging and transformation, while incorporating the transcendental idealist's thoughts on time, space, and thinking - thoughts that made him one of the most influential philosophers in history.
What can we know?
What should we do?
What may I hope?
The essence of Transcendental Idealism, through a lens of “Gavin,”
emphasizing transcendence.
The farther away we look, the further back in time we reach.
We see distant galaxies billions of years ago.
Like leafing through an immense book, we read the entire of the universe,
star by star, galaxy by galaxy. †
† Robbert Dijkgraaf, heard in the world premiere
of Sebastian Currier’s Mysterium, Feb 7.
* event cover art by Rita Quattrocchi