upcoming
CHANT
Qubit's final event of the 2024-25 season is unlike anything we've ever done. Each composer was inspired by different periods of early music, from Gregorian Chant, through Notre-Dame Polyphony, to Ars Nova. These four pieces individually reflect the richness of these different musical eras, as well as the inventiveness and creativity these ancient styles inspire in the contemporary imagination.
Laure Hiendl’s Ray Ray of Light† takes snippets of pre-modern, 12th century music and constantly rearranges cut-outs of musical gestures into a flickering static that blurs the boundary between gesture and texture; foreground and background. The singers act as a glitchy sampler, creates jarred, jagged sculptures of sound, existing as an afterimage within the interstices of multiple, musical presents.
Laura Steenberge’s St. Martial and King Stephen* is an arrangement of material from the 72 Verses for St.Martial, a polyphonic chant composed by Adémar de Chabannes in the year 1029. Composed for for 2 voices, 2 violins, contrabass, and French horn, it presents pitch material unchanged from the original chant, but with distortions of the original durations.
Striving after wind*, by Alec Hall, is a meditation on the existentialism of King Solomon, as contained within the Book of Ecclesiastes. Setting excerpts in English, the piece floats between harmonic fields and chant melodies, reflecting the agonies of our present through the Book’s timeless wisdom and perpetual search for meaning.
Onomastic Gymnastics, by Celeste Oram, takes inspiration from medieval French songs to explore both quirky counterpoint, as well as highly structured poetic forms, like the rondeau, which offer an opportunity to play with rhyme, repetition, and wordplay.
Please join us on Sunday, June 15th at the Church of St Luke and St Matthew, 520 Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn, to experience all of these works performed by the Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, along with Nicolee Kuester, James Ilgenfritz, Johnna Wu, and Jennifer Gersten.