Concerts in Texas

A series of concerts by the singing group Conspirare:

Signature Conspirare
World premiere of
To Touch the Sky by Kevin Puts
09.27.12 (7pm) Klett Performing Arts Center Georgetown, TX
09.28.12 (8pm) St. Martin’s Lutheran Church Austin, TX
09.29.12 (8pm) St. Martin’s Lutheran Church Austin, TX
09.30.12 (3pm) St. Matthews Episcopal Church Austin, TX
Pre-concert conversation with composer Kevin Puts by Dianne Donovan of KMFA one hour before each Austin performance (included in ticket)

Come together with Craig Hella Johnson & Company of Voices for music that defines the Conspirare family. Enjoy favorites from past years — spirituals, popular, and classical — plus the world premiere of To Touch the Sky (Nine Songs for Unaccompanied Chorus on Texts by Women). This resplendent new work by 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner Kevin Puts is an a cappella setting of texts by female poets, writers and mystics across the centuries (see complete texts), commissioned especially for Conspirare by American Composers Forum.

Includes a musical setting of Emily Brontë's At Castle Wood. The author says in the programme notes:

With this multicultural interpretation in mind, I began searching for poems by women concerning “spirituality” in the very broadest sense.   My aunt, the poet Fleda Brown, is always a tremendous resource when it
comes to finding texts, and her assistance here was no exception.  She  led me first to Marie Howe’s beautiful  “Annunciation” which I decided  could be sung by a soprano soloist over the first lines of the Magnificat sung by the rest of the chorus at the very opening.  I found poems by Emily Brontë, whose tragic “At Castle Wood” lies at the center of what is a loosely based arch form.  There are quotes from Sappho, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, poems by the 16th-century Indian poet-saint Mirabai, Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Christina Georgina Rosetti, and the medieval composer, philosopher and mystic Hildegard of Bingen, in whose “Most Noble Evergreen” I found great inspiration.