For pioneering NYC composer, bandleader, and multi-instrumentalist Kitty Brazelton, music is personal, and the personal is universal. Brazelton’s quarantine recording project COVID Choirs featured works including Storm (awarded the 2012 Carl von Ossietzky Composition Prize), a retranslation and setting of Psalm 104 as “a prayer for human safety” after Hurricane Sandy ravaged her hometown, New York City, along with Earthquake!, a retranslation and setting of the Koran’s chapters concerning the apocalypse, among several other choral works. Brazelton confronts the encroaching invisibility we all feel in a tech-driven world in The Planes of Your Location, a live concert experience featuring the LA-based Isaura String Quartet. Planes premiered at Art Share LA on March 7, 2020, days before the global shutdown.
The irrepressible Brazelton has always championed music’s power to unite—across genre, across tradition, across language: the Essential Prayers Project redefines, defies, yet embraces the tradition of prayer, making powerful words of hurt and hope accessible to all while her songwriting-borne “voice” lends these choral works a soulful, lived-in quality. In Brazelton’s most recent opera, “The Art of Memory,” words also ripple across time and transcend doctrine. Set against the eerily familiar backdrop of the fall of the Roman empire and its storm of religious ferment and intolerance, St Augustine’s early Christian yet ever-prescient message “now is all there is” rings out in anthem. Brazelton leads a punk rock-meets-plainchant in Max/MSP-sculpted 13-tet ensemble and supports two women in the two male lead roles of Augustine and Ambrose.
September 29 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Women’s Work