Month of Moderns 1: Not So Much Watching as Waiting

She wanted to go home but she was already home

We present two of the most beloved works we've commissioned; both consider the experience of ageing, both live wholly in its aloneness. Robert Maggio's The Woman Where We are Living, for harp and choir, sets Dr. Alzheimer's impersonal, clinical notes on his first patient, Auguste Deter, which contrast with her words of fear and confusion, and her growing anxiety. Stacy Garrop's In a House Besieged, for organ and choir, draws on essays of Lydia Davis that create a sometimes tender, at other times terrifying, world that is crumbling, closing in, empty. Both works are moving, looking at topics which touch us all, through the lens of choral singing.  Both require focused virtuosity and extraordinary vulnerability of singers. Both tell stories that touch everyone in the room. 

The concert also inaugurates our MoM 2024 exploration of the works Gabriel Jackson has written for us over our twelve-year relationship: According to Seneca is a virtuosic rumination on stoicism; a kind of weary wisdom emerges from its attempt to both acknowledge and eschew the question, "What does any of this mean?"