A piece about one's relationship to the natural world

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          “With the sun - 

          fear leaves me”

                   

                    -Pat Parker

 

SUN SONGS is a well researched musical exploration of history, ancestry, light, sound, color, space and time rooted in truth; a collaborative aural experience that asks us to listen not just with our ears, but with our whole selves. Listen with and listen to the parts of you that begin to show through the notes set free from the page:

 

          When are vocal lines listening to the bass to hear

          a rooted groove that you needed in that moment? 

 

          When is the guitar line the root? 

 

          When does the cello usher in moments of

          epiphany connecting time and space?

 

          When does piano become a percussion

          instrument played with as much delicacy as

          Florence Price’s “Dances in Cane Breaks”, as

          much honesty as Bessie Smith’s “Nobody Knows

          When You’re Down and Out”, as much groove as

          Mary Lou Williams, and as much meditative

          intellectual specificity as we have always done

          everything with.

 

Listen from a place of understanding. 

 

Listen with an open heart. 

 

When are we saying something different? 

 

When are we the same? 

 

Find your way back.

Find your way through.

Find your way to…each other. 

 

SUN SONGS isn’t a piece to be “acted,” SUN SONGS is a piece to be explored—the same way Mae Jemison explored space; the same way Alice Ball explored how solutions in different mediums effect how they interact; the same way Nora Holt explored how uniting musicians allowed us to find a way out of the Red Summer; the same way our ancestors explored the night sky only to discover that it was Us who created it…

 

SUN SONGS.

Hear the feeling. 

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