This Event has Passed
Pre-concert talk at 6:00pm in the Burleigh Cruikshank Memorial Chapel
Post-concert reception on the front lawn of the church
Marcos Balter’s Book of Colors explores the historical, philosophical, social, and cultural ways we interact with and understand colors. The work engages coloristic aspects of vocal music as a door into historic symbolisms relating to identity, cultural appropriations and misappropriations, synesthesia, astronomy.
History also lies deep in the origins of Aaron Helgeson’s monumental The Book of Never, a fascinating adaptation of the Novgorod Codex, a wooden book of psalms from 999 believed to be owned by a monk sent to convert the village of Novgorod from Paganism to Orthodox Christianity. After his excommunication, the monk focused on preserving history of the village through writing and overwriting many layers in the Codex, a technique that Aaron masters musically as he overlays these ancient texts of Novgorod with 20th-century liberal writers Wilde, Neruda, Stein, Angela Davis, and Thanhha Lai.
Novgorod was a town in what is now Ukraine. It is a sad irony of art being life that the work is born out of an authoritarian overlord, The Church, attempting to take over another land; in its failure to do so, it instead attempts to annihilate it, its people, and its culture. A concert that leaves us pondering the ingenuity and complexity of humans as we reflect on “how we got to this moment.”
The Book of Never is commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University.
Proof of vaccination and wearing masks while indoors are required to attend The Month of Moderns 2022.
Tickets: $35 General Admission, $25 Senior, $20 Student
