Everyone Became a Trail (2021)
Everyone Became a Trail (2021)
1.Temporary Address
2.A Surge
3.Balcony
4.Now, Dreaming
5.Everyone Became a Trail
Jessie Nucho, flute; Sophie Huet, clarinet
Brendan Lai-Tong, trombone; *Tony Gennaro, percussion Giacomo Fiore, electric guitar; Margaret Halbig, piano *Kevin Rogers, violin; *Natalie Raney, cello; Eugene Theriault, bass; *Julia Hathaway, soprano
Nathaniel Berman, conductor
Recorded October 1, 2021 at Old First Concerts, 1751 Sacramento Street, SF, CA 94109.
Assaf Shatil (b. 1976), text and music
Everyone Became a Trail (2021)
Everyone Became a Trail is a song cycle in five movements for soprano and chamber ensemble. The texts come from poems I wrote during what has by now become the first year of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. It does not have to do with the details of the pandemic per say, but more so with contemplations that came about through the strange shifts in our routines, expectations and sense of place. Aside from
stress and anxiety these changes also illuminated for me a sense of bewilderment with the mysteries of biology, mortality and our place on planet earth.
Conceptually the music is woven around the temporariness of harmonic locations as places to arrive at, inhabit and depart from. I see these areas as momentary revelations for a presence resonating with colorful radiance. Each movement investigates these ideas through the prism of ‘theme and variations’ however imagined in a nonlinear sense -- each is a reflection on similar states of meandering enchanted uncertainty, alternating mobiles of growth/decay and states of wavering stasis. These harmonic spaces of impermanent ‘routines’ will dissolve and reappear in a quest for stability aside adaptability and change.
I would like to deeply thank conductor and musical director of Ninth Planet, Nathaniel Berman, for giving me this opportunity to write the piece and for all the team of musicians in Ninth Planet for their sheer dedication - it has been an immense pleasure to know and to work with you all. –A.S.