New Morse Code News
I am very excited about what New Morse Code is up to these days, so I'm sharing our most recent newsletter here.
We’ve been focusing our creative energies on promoting issues important to us by creating space to listen and learn from important voices. We’re excited to share news of upcoming projects:
Ariel Impact Performance Award
We’re delighted to announce that we’ve been awarded the inaugural Ariel AVANT Impact Performance Award!
This award supports ensembles and collaborations designed to generate productive conversation and offer positive means of action around social justice issues. Our program, The Language of Landscapes, engages the audience in a conversation about the challenges and urgencies of climate action and responsible consumption while also presenting optimistic possibilities for renewable energy, scientific discovery, and innovative technologies in space exploration.
We’ll be taking a tour of 5 venues across the country, sharing a program built around Christopher Stark’s The Language of Landscapes, which uses field recordings from across the country to poignantly address dwindling resources. The award will also fund a new collaboration with Andy Akiho and Hannah Wasileski about the OSIRIS-REx mission (and space exploration in general), and a new work from Viet Cuong about renewable energy. In addition, we’re excited to develop engagement activities in each city, and are looking forward to building a team of experts to help us explore how we can all take meaningful action to confront climate change.
For more information, visit here.
DWB live on Demand October 23-29
DWB (Driving While Black) is a gripping, personal, chamber opera about an African-American woman teaching her son to drive in a country where this has become a potentially lethal activity. The libretto is drawn from soprano Roberta Gumbel’s personal story and set to gripping music from Susan Kander.
As we have developed this piece over the last few years with Roberta, Susan, and director Chip Miller, the conversation about racial bias and injustice has become more critical and urgent than ever. We hope that performances of this piece will create opportunities for people to come together to listen to each other and have conversations like this one in Kansas City last year:
We’re so excited to share a digital performance of the piece with the world, sponsored by Baruch Performing Arts Center and Opera Omaha. Thanks to Post Haus and Oktaven Audio for the audio recording, Four/Ten Media for the video, and to all our New Morse Connections supporters for their work on this project.
Register HERE to attend October 23-29.
Admission is pay-what-you-wish. Join us on October 29th at 6ET for a special discussion with a panel of professors, students and performers, including librettist Roberta Gumbel.
Made at Avaloch
Avaloch Farm Music Institute has become an essential part of NMC’s identity. It’s our summer home, a place to develop collaborations, incubate ideas, reconnect with friends, and take inspiration from our peers.
While Avaloch’s 2020 season was cancelled, we’ve kept in touch with Made at Avaloch, a series of weekly presentations from Avaloch alumni who share work developed at Avaloch and discuss how those projects have changed since their time in New Hampshire. Hosted by Deb Sherr, Katherine Dowling, Mike, and Hannah, we’ve had a blast reconnecting with Avaloch all-stars since July. (You can check out the archives here).
On October 30th, New Morse Code will be sharing some of our own Avaloch projects, speaking with Robert Honstein and David Crowell about our work together. Hope you can join us at 8pm EST.
Avaloch Premiere of Robert Honstein’s “Down Down Baby”
The Emigrants
Our latest recording,The Emigrants, is now available on Bandcamp! The Emigrants is a documentary chamber work by George Lam for New Morse Code and the pre-recorded voices of immigrant musicians in Queens, NY.
We recently chatted with composer George Lam and featured interviewee Rafael Leal about the creation of the piece on Five Borough Music Festival’s "Home Brew" Series, hosted by Michael Unterman:
We’re excited that these projects help us have a larger conversation about some of the issues we’re facing as a culture, and hope you can join us on these journeys.