Resist: Challenging State and Circumstance

Arnold Epley, conductor

Musica Vocale ends its 11^thseason with Resist: Challenging State and Circumstance, a socially-charged program of beautiful music that continues the commitment of Musica Vocale’s 11-year history of presenting lesser-heard music in unique venues in the Kansas City metro area.

This program presents contemporary musical works that examine oppression on the basis of race, political ideology, color, and creed.  Poetry and song have proven to be particularly poignant ways of exploring the extremes of human experience, and often the poets and musicians have witnessed oppression and discrimination first-hand as a part of their experience.  Long after public debates, trials, and political slogans have fallen into obscurity, the musical setting of words born of painful circumstance endure - even centuries after the events that sparked their creation.  In this socially-charged program, the final concert of our 11th season, Musica Vocale is presenting three works that relate to the contemporary experiences of displacement, oppression, and persecution.

At the heart of this unique program is a new work by Australian American composer Melissa Dunphy (b. 1980).  She is a Philadelphia-based composer with strong connections to Missouri via music written for the Simon Carrington Chamber Singers and the St. Louis Chamber Chorus.  Dunphy possesses an eclectic musical style and a unique skill at setting language to music, particularly political speech.  She is now well-known for engaging contemporary issues with works like The Gonzales Cantata (addressing the 2007 dismissal of U.S. Attorneys by the Bush Justice Department) and her motet What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach - performed by Musica Vocale in our ninth season. We are presenting the Kansas City premiere of a new work, AMERICAN DREAMers, a multi-movement work which sets prose and poetry by five young Americans struggling through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals crisis (DACA) in the wake of the 2016 election. This will be the Kansas City premier of this piece, and only the sixth performance of this work since its creation in 2018.

Zachary Wadsworth’s War-Dreams is an innovative blended choral work by the rising Canadian-American composer.  His work sets poetry from Walt Whitman’s Old War-Dreams, an excerpt from Leaves of Grass, punctuating it with transcendent quotations of William Byrd’s motet Bow thine ear, O Lord.  Wadsworth writes that Whitman “...ponders the lingering, inescapable memories of violence. Byrd’s ‘Bow thine ear’ describes a similarly hopeless scene: a desolate and ruined Jerusalem, unaided by a higher power.”  While Whitman’s poetry ruminates on the ongoing anguish of violence and destruction of the American Civil War, Byrd’s motet is borne of paranoia and fear of sedition in 16th century England, where religious identity was frequently equated with treason, persecution, and thread of execution.

These new pieces will be complimented by several works by established composers.  Two works by noted Kansas City composer Geoffrey Wilcken focus on Nelson Mandela’s public speeches denouncing apartheid in South Africa.  A series of psalm settings by Chester Alwes revolve around themes of persecution and redemption.