Projects Currently Touring
Silence is the fundamental condition of rural life: vast, unyielding, and terrible in its immensity. Every song, every story, every tradition is a flicker of defiance against it.
Schnee
Music by Hans Abrahamsen and Richard Drehoff Jr.
This production pairs the expansive, lustrous Schnee by Hans Abrahamsen, with a new video installation that draws in the listener and underscores the groundbreaking form of the composition. The larger piece is paired with a new work by Richard Drehoff Jr. written for earspace to precede Schnee.
“The music and its time can stand still, or move either backwards or forwards.”
-Hans Abrahamsen
Collaborations with Ah Young Hong
and Michael Hersch
A Rural Requiem, or The Great Silence
By Cody Criswell-Badillo
The 11-movement work by Cody Criswell-Badillo, written for earspace, maps the structure of a traditional requiem onto the music and stories of rural Texas. Drawing from Texas folk traditions, Baptist hymns, corridos, and shape-note tunes, the piece unfolds as a communal elegy, equal parts remembrance and renewal. Scored for violin, viola, cello, flute, oboe, clarinet, piano, percussion, and guitar, it weaves sung vignettes with instrumental movements, each one echoing the voices of people and places that shaped the composer’s life.
Developed during Criswell-Badillo’s 2024 residency in Corsicana, TX and inspired by his years in the oilfields of Texas and the Midwest, A Rural Requiem reflects his roots in the working-class cultures of the Southwest and his mixed Texas, Tejano and Indigenous Coahuiltecan heritage.
Across the ensemble’s history, some of our closest collaborators are the “transfixing” (New Yorker) soprano Ah Young Hong and Michael Hersch, composer of “works that are often startling in their complexity, beauty, and demonic fury” (New York Times). The current program features hong as soloist alongside Hersch’s works, Trauerrefrain and Absalon, fili mi (after Josquin) among a varied a program.
Dark Holler
By David Kirkland Garner
Composer David Kirkland Garner deftly weaves influences from the musical tradition of the southern U.S. into his compositions. An avid banjoist and fiddler, Garner’s incorporation of vernacular elements is oriented less around collage and insertion of found sound as it is demonstrative of a honed technique for development of motive, orchestration, and structural pacing. Garner often approaches vernacular material from one of two angles — either we hear idiomatic folkloric material presented first and then deconstructed, or we hear the deconstructed fragments initially as Garner slowly reveals the larger whole, adding elements in other parts of the orchestra or fleshing out the initial motive. Fragments of fiddle influenced melodies are passed throughout the ensemble, as Garner twists and turns the motives in driving, pulsating textures. Swarming, chromatic motives that are initially introduced in a stylistically ambiguous fashion reveal themselves as pent up seeds of full throated hoedowns.
The piece is presented in a new reduction written for earspace alongside other works invoking the US South.
