A concert of premieres digging deep into 21st-century American life. Justine’s Shallow Breath and Stealth is based on Jena Osman’s prismatic poem Motion Studies, which follows a couple hoping to shake off spiderwebs of data to live surveillance-free in a world that accepts the ubiquitous surveillance of unwilling citizens. Sax legend, Matthew Levy, joins us for Nick’s Watersheds, a work fueled by the words of eloquent, outspoken environmental thinkers on how our shared spaces are created not by political borders, but by the flow of water. Tying the program together is Gabriel’s Choral Music, a scrapbook of his time as a high school choral singer, set against the backdrop of pre-9/11 American “innocence”: exploring, from the vantage point of the present, the fallibility of memory and the ethical murk that surrounds nostalgia.

Justine F. Chen, Shallow Breath and Stealth (world premiere)
Nicholas Cline, Watersheds
Gabriel Kahane, Choral Music (world premiere)