“Heard” weaves together music and storytelling in a show built on the deep and formative personal experiences that animate the music of eight wide-ranging composers working in America today. Coming from disparate parts of the world (Havana, East St. Louis, Seoul, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Camuy) and working in eclectic styles, these composers represent a cross-section of America’s musical melting pot. With its omnivorous musical appetites and passion for musical storytelling, Alarm Will Sound is the ideal guide for this adventurous event.
I love making shows that tell stories. My own connection to a piece is so often deepened by better understanding the human context around it: the world the composer lived in, what he or she felt the music to mean, and how it came to be. I’m always eager to share this context with other listeners too. And while I’ve never thought concerts were great places to dispense information, I think they’re wonderful places to tell stories.
Storytelling is in Alarm Will Sound’s DNA. At our very start in 2001, we committed ourselves to exploring new concert formats, and to finding the most impactful ways to present the music that excited us. This is our third storytelling event at Carnegie Hall. For our very first appearance here in 2006, we created “Odd Couples,” a concert about unexpected personal relationships between composers of wildly different music. That theatrical performance centered on Frank Zappa and Edgard Varèse, musical soulmates who never met. In 2009, we presented “1969,” a unique theater piece about a pivotal historical moment and four great composers— Leonard Bernstein, John Lennon, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luciano Berio—who were grappling with it. And in 2018, we performed “This Music Should Not Exist” on the dramatic life and music of György Ligeti.
Tonight’s show began with a conversation with our longtime friend Tania León, who brought us a stimulating challenge: How could we make a show that would bring together the widest range of music being created by composers in America today? I’m always drawn to concerts that make disparate music feel connected, and the motivating idea here—the diversity and breadth of American expression—is one that’s fundamental to Tania’s sense of justice and a vital aspect of Alarm Will Sound’s mission (as expressed in particular in our Matt Marks Impact Fund, which in 2021 selected Damon’s ambitious podcast opera project, one episode of which premieres tonight).
As Alarm Will Sound began to think through the works written for us, our minds went in so many directions: Tania’s invitation opened the floodgates for us to explore the vast catalog of music created for the ensemble. We had a vigorous discussion about what repertoire we’d bring here. There was so much that we were eager to share, and the broader the reach of the repertoire, the better it would fulfill the mission that Tania had sent us on. But … how to make such a wide-ranging program hang together?
As I began to explore the music we wanted to present and to discuss the works with the composers, I was struck by how many of them reflected on deeply personal, formative experiences. None of this was music that was new to us, and many of these composers have been in our musical family for ages. But the stories were surprisingly unfamiliar. Chris P. Thompson and I have had countless deep conversations about music and musical roots and Alarm Will Sound’s mission since he joined the ensemble in 2008. How did I not know about this experience that had first fired his passion for music and inspired him with the heights that performance could achieve? Texu Kim was a dear friend with whom Alarm Will Sound had collaborated countless times since we first met him at the Mizzou International Composers Festival in 2012. He even took my whole family on a personal tour of Seoul. How had I never had any inkling of these emotional contours around the genesis of his musical journey? And Damon Davis has been talking with me about his vision for Ligeia Mare ever since Alarm Will Sound first came to St. Louis in 2014. (“I wanna know how we can all come together to do something extremely awesome,” he wrote after that first concert.) How had I never known about these life experiences that rooted this work?
It turns out that it’s easy not to know deep things about even the collaborators and friends who are dearest to us. I’d never have guessed any of these stories from the music itself. But learning about them enriched my experience of the music, and in many cases transformed how I performed it. It seemed imperative to find a way to bring this context into the show itself, and I wondered, “Could the stories themselves be the thread to tie together all of the music on this show into a holistic experience?”
Alarm Will Sound’s past storytelling events have always adopted a unifying voice throughout. But we’ve never before created a storytelling show focused on so many composers from such widely different backgrounds. So for this event, we created a space where each composer could have their story heard in a way that felt authentic to them. You will hear each of their voices. I am deeply grateful to all of the composers for all that they are sharing with us tonight. Thank you all for hearing them, and us.
—Alan Pierson
Tania León is highly regarded as a composer and conductor, and for her accomplishments as an educator and advisor to arts organizations. Her orchestral work Stride, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Music. In 2022, León was named a recipient of the 45th Annual Kennedy Center Honors. The following year, she was awarded the Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition from Northwestern University. Most recently, León became the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s composer-in-residence—a two-year post that began last September. She also holds Carnegie Hall’s Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair for the 2023–2024 season. She has been awarded the XIX Premio SGAE de la Música Iberoamericana Tomás Luis de Victoria 2023, becoming the first woman to be honored with Spain’s highest composition prize. In 2024, she earned the Distinguished Artist Award from the International Society for the Performing Arts.
In addition to composing, León’s activities include being a founding member and first music director of Dance Theatre of Harlem, founding the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s Community Concert Series, co-founding the American Composers Orchestra’s Sonidos de las Américas festivals, serving as new music advisor to the New York Philharmonic, and founding and serving as artistic director of Composers Now. In 2023, Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired León’s archive.
The word toque in Spanish means “touch” and is used not just for physical touch, but also to signify playing an instrument, playing a game, sounding an alarm, or giving something a finishing touch. This composition is inspired by a famous Cuban dance tune (or danzón) called “Almendra,” which means “almond” in English. “Almendra” was composed in 1938 by the Cuban bandleader Abelardito Valdés. This tune is so well-known that a Cuban needs to hear only two notes of it to recognize the piece. Danzón is the official dance music of Cuba and is based on European ballroom dancing. It is elegant and virtuosic, and generally has a light and sprightly feel.
Chris P. Thompson is a percussionist and composer. Having grown up among the high-energy sound world of modern marching percussion and various genres of electronic music, he creates work that glows with mathematical precision and illustrates vivid scenes of potent emotional states. His fifth album of original compositions, Stay the Same, will be released April 4, 2024. In October 2020, he released True Stories & Rational Numbers. A nine-movement work sequenced as electronic music but also fully scored for four pianists, it represents his investigation of just intonation and the natural mathematics of rhythm and harmony. Described as “like a futuristic blend of Aphex Twin, Roger Eno, and Erik Satie” (anEarful), True Stories received its world premiere live performance at London’s Barbican Centre in 2021. That same year he collaborated with playwright Rajiv Joseph and Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company to create Red Folder, an illustrated play for the Steppenwolf NOW series. Red Folder was also adapted as an educational program that reached more than 5,000 young people in 70 schools.
The original Hanabi was a short track on my EP Lot Hero from 2017, wherein I played with the similarities between quick, articulated samples of marching percussion instruments and the pops and sizzles of a fireworks show I had sampled. (Hanabi means “fireworks” in Japanese). This track was also the first time I ever incorporated the sound of a metronome into my music (a creative delight that has proven endlessly fruitful in my work to this day). I wanted to create a subtle transition: from the rigid structure of metronomic time to the chaotic entropy of fireworks.
After the record was out, I started working on a way to perform it live, which would involve me performing on a setup that included marching tenors. To open the show, I would play an extended version of Hanabi, where the backing tracks spun out the metronome sounds into different grooves, complemented by live drum kit and electric bass.
The live show I was developing never came to fruition, which is sad because I was excited by the idea of playing my music live with drummer and bassist friends. However, the extended, click-heavy version of Hanabi was interestingly different enough that I actually included it on my next album as Hanabi (in-ear extended mix). If Aphex Twin could remix himself I figured I could too.
Eventually, Hanabi (in-ear extended mix) entered the ears of one Miles Brown, and next thing I knew ... here is a full arrangement for Alarm Will Sound, and I get to play my terrifying marching tenor parts live with my friends after all.
Christian Quiñones is a Puerto Rican composer who explores personal stories through the lens of cultural identity. From sampling and auto-tune to interactive multimedia, he actively interacts with existing music to create intertextual narratives. His music has been performed by Alarm Will Sound, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Dogs of Desire, JACK Quartet, New York Youth Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, ~Nois, Yarn/Wire, TAK Ensemble, icarus Quartet, Bergamot Quartet, Hub New Music, and Ensemble Dal Niente. He was recently selected as a composer-in-residence at the Copland House. Other fellowships include the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival, and Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab.
One of my most constant fears in life is reaching the day when my mother can’t hear me or listen to music. She has congenital hearing loss, and I still clearly remember the day when as a kid I understood what that meant. The terrifying thought of her one day not being able to understand me or being able to enjoy music has always been a persistent but seemingly distant dread, but a lot of that has become more imminent recently. The past year we received the news that her hearing loss reached 50 percent in one ear. After that moment, even in the most mundane situations in life, I often think, “How would my mom listen to this?” With the help of a website that simulates the effect of different types of hearing loss, this piece strives to answer that question. The piece takes short samples of many songs that I didn’t necessarily like, but that my mom used to listen to a lot when we were growing up, and reimagines them through a filtered and maximalist lens. Sonically, the piece slowly morphs from a muted and dark soundscape into a brightly colored and vibrant texture that mirrors my mother’s congenital chronic condition.
Damon Davis is an award-winning, post-disciplinary artist based in St. Louis. His work spans a spectrum of creative mediums to tell stories that explore how identity is informed by power and mythology. Davis is co-director of the critically acclaimed documentary Whose Streets? that chronicled the 2014 Ferguson uprisings. In 2020, critic Ben Davis cited his project All Hands On Deck, which captured the hands of people who shaped and upheld the Ferguson movement, as one of the “100 Works of Art That Defined the Decade.” His work has been nominated for a Peabody Award and is featured in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Davis is a Firelight Media, Sundance Labs, TED, and Kennedy Center Citizen Artist fellow.
Ligeia Mare is a sci-fi electronic fantasy opera written and composed by myself. Inspired by the life and philosophy of jazz legend Sun Ra, the story follows Cosmo, an awkward adolescent with the gift of astral projection while dreaming. When Cosmo’s jazz pianist father, Cassius, falls ill with brain cancer, Cassius begins to believe he is actually from Saturn and had forgotten years before during his crash landing. Cosmo knows the key to saving his father lies somewhere in the stars, exploring the solar system every night on his quest. As the real world and the dream world begin to blur together, Cosmo discovers his true identity in his dreamland by building his own myths that turn out to be true, demonstrating the power of myth in our own self-discovery.
Elijah Daniel Smith is quickly establishing himself as one of today’s leading young composers. His music ranges from orchestral compositions to multimedia and interdisciplinary collaborations. Smith’s affinity for dense and complex textures, rhythmic ambiguity and fluidity, and rich gravitational harmonies shines through in all of his creations. His music has been performed by world-renowned ensembles that include the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for MusicNOW, New England Philharmonic, Alarm Will Sound, Contemporaneous, JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Bergamot Quartet, Sandbox Percussion, Lorelei Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, Dither, Copland House, Ensemble Linea, Ecce Ensemble, Lea Mattson Collective, TAK Ensemble, Hub New Music, and Earspace. Upcoming projects include works for the American Composers Orchestra, and an octet for Sō Percussion and ~Nois.
Vermilion Glare aims to capture the feeling of straining to visually focus on what’s in front of you when the setting sun is shining directly into your eyes.
Texu Kim writes music inspired by everyday experiences, music that reflects modern Korea’s multicultural nature, and music that is humorous yet sophisticated. His work also incorporates and expands elements of Korean folk music. An impressive roster of ensembles has programmed Kim’s compositions, including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, New World Symphony, National Orchestra of Korea, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble intercontemporain, and Ensemble Modern. From 2014 to 2016, Kim served as composer-in-residence of the Korean National Symphony Orchestra, launching its Composers’ Atelier program that commissions, mentors, and performs other Korean composers’ orchestral works. Kim has received honors from the Fromm Music Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Copland House, SCI/ASCAP, and American Modern Ensemble, in addition to winning the Barlow Prize, Ilshin Composition Prize, Isang Yun International Composition Prize, and a silver medal at the 1998 International Chemistry Olympiad.
Līlā is a Sanskrit word that can mean any form of performing arts by gods (though anything can be a god in Hinduism). This piece draws inspiration from the Korean shamanistic ritual called gut. A gut serves various functions: to comfort the dead and send them to where they belong; to heal the unwell by expelling the devil; and to bless a community, such as a family, company, or town. The gut differs from other related traditions (like danse macabre, for example) by its ultimate goal being the pursuit of the well-being of the living. It also exhibits humanistic values through its captivating (thus entertaining) music, full of cathartic quality and boundless energy.
The gut is considered one of the highest art forms in Korea, where the phrase shaman-like means “viscerally intuitive as a performer.” This piece is written in memory of the music director laureate of the Oakland Symphony, Michael Morgan (1957–2021)—one of the most shaman-like musicians with whom I have worked.
Bora Yoon is a Korean American composer, vocalist, and sound artist who conjures audiovisual soundscapes using digital devices, voice, and instruments from a variety of cultures and historical centuries to formulate storytelling through music, movement, and sound. Featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Wire, TED, and the National Endowment for the Arts podcast for her use of unusual instruments and everyday found objects as music, she evokes what George Lewis describes as “a kind of sonic memory garden” that uses voice, viola, Tibetan singing bowls, vocoder, Bible pages, bike bells, turntables, walkie-talkies, chimes, water, and electronics. She has been commissioned by Sō Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, and Voices of Ascension Chorus and Orchestra. Yoon’s music has provided the live score for Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, an interdisciplinary theater adaptation co-commissioned by Asia Society, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Edinburgh International Festival, and Singapore International Festival of Arts. Her original music can also be heard on Apple TV+’s Pachinko, based on The New York Times best-selling novel by Min Jin Lee. Yoon has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Asian American Arts Alliance, Princeton University, Fromm Music Foundation, Barlow Endowment, Sorel Organization, and OPERA America.
Tracing the invisibility of female labor, the song cycle Casual Miracles celebrates the divine feminine and casual miracle of life and birth that women produce daily, globally raise, protect and foster. The work traces how one navigates that life, growing a sense of inner compass and developing an ability to zoom out to see the larger ocean of it all, with a middle movement that pauses to ponder the larger grand design (if any) of how souls might be passed out, up in heaven, in a lottery of how spirits are given to physical bodies, and family configurations and dynamics shape who we become. A poetic meditation on how the traffic of souls must be swirling, with souls entering and leaving, like in the Day of the Dead rituals in San Francisco, hearkens to this idea of everything culminating in a larger ring cycle of life, birth, and death, like a snake biting its tail in a larger spinning wheel of mythology. An ancient Korean traditional melody weaves and echoes this sentiment, sung and brought together by the storytelling and sonic worlds, conjuring how these seemingly disparate events are connected by energy and invisible knots tied across time and place. This cycle is imagined as vignettes and scenes of a larger developing radio play or hybrid concert format work. This song cycle brings full circle my origins as a songwriter turned soundscape artist, now as composer-performer and narrator of this work—to synthesize a hybrid work of story and song in collaboration with Alarm Will Sound.