2021 Collaborative Works Festival: Strangers in a Strange Land
Explore themes of immigration and migration in song with the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago. This three-part festival features the works of a wide range of composers, many of whom immigrated or migrated during the course of their lifetimes.
Concert I: Songs of the New World
The Festival’s opening program, Songs of the New World, showcases songs about the immigrant experience.
Songs by composers Ian Cusson, Missy Mazzoli, Mohammed Fairouz, and Ruth Crawford Seeger feature on this program alongside songs by Franz Schubert, who wrote many songs on the themes of wandering and pilgrimage. A highlight of this performance will be the Midwest premiere of a new song cycle for tenor and string quartet written by Nico Muhly, Stranger, in which Muhly juxtaposes settings of accounts of immigration through Ellis Island with settings of texts protesting the United States’ Chinese Exclusion policies of the late 19th century, which persisted through the years of World War II.
Concert II: Strangers
Strangers features the music of composers who themselves immigrated to the United States, including Rebecca Clarke, Erich Korngold, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, and Irving Berlin. In addition, the program explores the songs of Florence Price who migrated to Chicago from Arkansas in 1927 as part of The Great Migration.
Also featured on this program are songs of the composer, pianist, and actor Robert Owens, who remained in Europe for much of his life after serving in the US army during World War II, completing his musical studies in Paris, and eventually settling in Münich, Germany.
Concert III: The Songs We Carried
This performance examines the ways in which song is both an important method of cultural exchange as well as an art form that many rely on to preserve their cultural identity upon arriving in a new location.
The program features folk song arrangements by composers such as Benjamin Britten, Béla Bartók, Rebecca Clarke, Percy Grainger, alongside spiritual arrangements by Florence Price, Margaret Bonds and more.