Join us at Civitella NYC on Thursday, May 16th to celebrate the album release of Beaufort Scales by composer Christopher Cerrone (CRF 2012, Advisory Council Member, Juror). We will be screening the film documenting the Lorelei Ensemble‘s performance of the oratorio at Mass MoCA, with accompanying visuals and lighting.
After the 35-minute screening, Christopher Cerrone will engage in conversation with a couple of his collaborators on the project, inspired by Sir Francis Beaufort’s scientific “Beaufort wind force scale.”
As Cerrone told us about the origin of Beaufort Scales:
I first became aware of the Beaufort scale because of Scott Haler’s book Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a Nineteenth-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry. The book describes the author’s obsession with the elegance and beauty of this 13-step, 200-word scale, still in use, which measures wind from its gentlest (“Calm / smoke rises vertically”) to its roughest (“The air is filled with foam and spray”). I came to share Scott’s obsession and began composing a work for eight female voices and electronics, transforming the steps of the scale into 13 corresponding movements of escalating musical intensity. As the work proceeds and the weather becomes more chaotic, each of the voices is increasingly distorted. This mirrors our technology-saturated world, one in which uncanny and tumultuous weather has a growing presence.Interpolated between these 13 sung movements are four narrated interludes featuring four different texts—the novels of Herman Melville and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the poetry of Anne Carson, and the King James Bible—all of which comment on the state of weather at one point in time, serving as both a reprieve and a reflection upon the surrounding
Thursday, May 16th, 2024
6:00 PM Refreshments
6:30 PM Screening & Conversation
CDs will be available for a donation.
(You can download, stream, or physically purchase the album here starting May 17th.)
Seating is limited. Masks are encouraged. Friends are welcome!
RSVP via email to civitella@civitella.org.
28 Hubert St / New York, NY / 10013 movements.