Songs With(out) Words: Is there there there?

Venue: St. Mark's Lutheran Church
Date: Fri March 2, 2012 8:00pm
City: San Francisco
Email: info@voltisf.org
Price Range: $10-30
Tickets: 415.771.3352

Volti

Gertrude Stein’s poetry inspires Seattle composer John Muehleisen in his new piece for VOLTI, San Francisco’s award-winning chamber choir. Volti concerts on March 2/3/4, 2012, in San Francisco, Mill Valley and Berkeley, explore the expressive potential of the human voice, both through poetry and through the beauty and variety of the pure musical sounds achievable with an ensemble of 20 top-notch professional singers. The all-contemporary program features recent works by Bay Area composers Robin Estrada and David Conte, as well as the Muehleisen world premiere.

A visit to “The Steins Collect” at SF-MOMA last summer inspired Seattle composer John Muehleisen to write …is knowing… for Volti, setting four poems by Gertrude Stein. Muehleisen says, “For me, the most fascinating aspect of Stein’s writing is her desire to create a linguistic analogy to what Picasso, the cubists, and other avant garde painters were doing visually. … The real genius of Gertrude Stein is the way that she seemingly forces us through her use of language to ultimately stop trying to make sense of the words and simply listen to them as sounds, even as music, or at least to listen musically.”

Commissioned by Volti and originally premiered in 2010, Robin Estrada's Paghahandog explodes and deconstructs a short Tagalog text of dedication into a kaleidoscope of joyful sound. By contrast, Without Words by Huang Ruo paints the minimal text of Li Yü (the last emperor of the Tang dynasty) with delicate brushstrokes. John Stirling Walker's memorial for Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired the moving work The Homecoming by San Franciscan David Conte, originally written for the 40th anniversary of King's death. Reena Esmail captures the dense suspension of Carol Muske-Dukes' poetry in her finely wrought White Key, which will receive its West Coast premiere.