The Crossing | |
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Background information | |
Origin | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States |
Genres | Chorus |
Years active | 2005–present |
Labels | Innova Recordings, Albany Records, Navona Records, Cantaloupe Music, ECM Records |
Members | Katy Avery, Nathaniel Barnett, Jessica Beebe, Julie Bishop, Kelly Ann Bixby, Karen Blanchard, Steven Bradshaw, Scott Dettra, Colin Dill, Micah Dingler, Robert Eisentrout, Ryan Fleming, Joanna Gates, Dimitri German, Fiona Gillespie, John Grecia, Barbara Hill, Steven Hyder, Michael Jones, Heather Kayan, Heidi Kurtz, Chelsea Lyons, Ken Lovett, Maren Montalbano, Frank Mitchell, Rebecca Myers, Donald Nally, Dan O'Dea, Rebecca Oehlers, James Reese, Kyle Sackett, Daniel Schwartz, Rebecca Siler, Daniel Spratlan, Elisa Sutherland, Dan Taylor, Laura Ward, Jason Weisinger, Jackson Williams, Shari Alise Wilson |
Website | crossingchoir |
The Crossing is an American professional chamber choir, conducted by Donald Nally and based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It focuses on new music, commission and premiere works, and collaborates with various venues and instrumental ensembles.
Formed by a group of friends in 2005, the ensemble has since grown and according to The New York Times in 2014, "has made a name for itself in recent years as a champion of new music". [1] It focuses on new music, commissioning most of what it sings, and collaborates with venues and instrumental ensembles internationally.
The choir was the resident choir of the Spoleto Festival, Italy, in 2007; appeared at Miller Theatre of Columbia University in the American premiere of James Dillon's Nine Rivers with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE); joined Bang on a Can's first Philadelphia Marathon; and has appeared with the American Composers Orchestra, Network for New Music, Quicksilver Baroque, Lyric Fest, Piffaro, red fish blue fish, Tempesta di Mare Baroque Chamber Orchestra, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, Toshimaru Nakamura, Dolce Suono, and in the summer of 2013, The Rolling Stones.
The ensemble has sung in venues including the Walt Disney Concert Hall, The Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; it made its Lincoln Center debut in July 2014 in a world premiere of a composition by John Luther Adams in a collaboration with the Mostly Mozart Festival, the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, eighth blackbird, JACK Quartet, and TILT Brass.
The choir frequently commissions works and has presented over 70 world premieres. Projects for the 2017-18 season include commissions with Michael Gilbertson, Aaron Helgeson, Benjamin C.S. Boyle, and Kile Smith.
The ensemble records extensively and has released ten recordings on various labels: Innova Recordings, Navona Records, Albany Records, ECM Records, and Cantaloupe Music. Its recording of Thomas Lloyd's Bonhoeffer was nominated for Best Choral Performance for the 59th Grammy Awards.
The choir is the recipient of three ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming as well as the Dale Warland Singers Commission Award from Chorus America; conductor Donald Nally also received the 2012 Louis Botto Award for Innovative Action and Entrepreneurial Zeal and the 2017 Michael Korn Founders Award for Development of the Professional Choral Art for his work with the ensemble.
In December 2014, the ensemble began a collaboration with visual artists Allora & Calzadilla in their largest U.S. exhibition to date, Intervals, at the Perelman Building at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Fabric Workshop and Museum. This included over 300 performances of David Lang's Lifespan as well as monthly performances of In the Midst of Things, a fifteen-minute unaccompanied re-imagining of moments from Franz Joseph Haydn's The Creation (1798).
In June 2016, the organization launched an ambitious commissioning project called Seven Responses, the purpose of which was to perform Dieterich Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri (BuxWV 75) juxtaposed with commissioned responses by Caroline Shaw, Hans Thomalla, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Anna Thorvaldsdottir. David T. Little, Santa Ratniece, and Lewis Spratlan, in collaboration with Quicksilver Baroque and International Contemporary Ensemble. The two-day program was premiered at the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral and later reprised at Merkin Concert Hall as a part of the 2016 Mostly Mozart Festival in Lincoln Center.
In 2009, the ensemble established an annual festival, held in the early summer, consisting of several new-music concerts in one month, with commissioned works based on a central theme tying the entire festival together.
The theme for Month of Moderns 2009 was The Celan Project, works based on the poetry of Paul Celan.
Month of Moderns 2010 featured The Levine Project, works based on or inspired by the words of Pulitzer-Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine. "Seneca Sounds" was the focus for Month of Moderns 2011, with works based on the words and philosophy of Seneca the Younger.
Month of Moderns 2012 was centered on Modern Vespers, works fashioned after the ancient evening prayer service, cast in modern themes and musical languages.
A much larger project, The Gulf (Between You and Me), based on a three-part commissioned poem by Pierre Joris inspired by the Deep Water Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, dominated Month of Moderns 2013.
Month of Moderns 2014 included five major commissioned world premieres loosely based around Novalis's poem Astralis questioning our existence and eternity.
After 2014, the ensemble moved away from a theme solely surrounding the Month of Moderns alone and more towards a theme for each season. The Month of Moderns festival continues to be a signature part of the organization's season, regardless of theme, with each concert featuring at least one or more world premiere.
In April 2014, Crossing co-founder Jeffrey Dinsmore died at age 42; he was preparing for a rehearsal with The Crossing and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Disney Hall. The ensemble subsequently established The Jeffrey Dinsmore Memorial Fund.
The Crossing later commissioned 15 composers who had a connection with Mr. Dinsmore to write short quartets to be published in a printed omnibus. The ensemble gave the world premiere of those works on July 8, 2016 in Philadelphia.
In the summer of 2015, The Crossing partnered with the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Montana, to offer a week-long fellowship intensive for students of composition and choral singing. In 2017, the program expanded to two weeks, offering educational opportunities to conducting fellows as well. Composing, conducting, and singing fellows interact with members of The Crossing on a daily basis, exploring, writing, and singing new music throughout the week. The Big Sky Choral Initiative continued its creative journey with a new paradigm in 2018, collaborating with Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison to create a new work specific to this unique gathering at Big Sky. The work draws on the land of Montana - its history, beauty, struggles, and expanse - as inspiration for this hour-long work for unaccompanied choir and film. [2]
Evan Ziporyn is an American composer of post-minimalist music with a cross-cultural orientation, drawing equally from classical music, avant-garde, various world music traditions, and jazz. Ziporyn has composed for a wide range of ensembles, including symphony orchestras, wind ensembles, many types of chamber groups, and solo works, sometimes involving electronics. Balinese gamelan, for which he has composed numerous works, has compositions. He is known for his solo performances on clarinet and bass clarinet; additionally, Ziporyn plays gender wayang and other Balinese instruments, saxophones, piano & keyboards, EWI, and Shona mbira.
Colin Matthews, OBE is an English composer of contemporary classical music. Noted for his large-scale orchestral compositions, Matthews is also a prolific arranger of other composer's music, including works by Berlioz, Britten, Dowland, Mahler, Purcell and Schubert. Other arrangements include orchestrations of all Debussy's 24 Préludes, both books of Debussy's Images, and two movements—Oiseaux tristes and La vallée des cloches—from Ravel's Miroirs. Having received a doctorate from University of Sussex on the works of Mahler, from 1964–1975 Matthews worked with his brother David Matthews and musicologist Deryck Cooke on completing a performance version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony.
David Lang is an American composer living in New York City. Co-founder of the musical collective Bang on a Can, he was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion, which went on to win a 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices. Lang was nominated for an Academy Award for "Simple Song #3" from the film Youth.
The London Sinfonietta is an English contemporary chamber orchestra founded in 1968 and based in London.
Bernard Rands is a British-American contemporary classical composer. He studied music and English literature at the University of Wales, Bangor, and composition with Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna in Darmstadt, Germany, and with Luigi Dallapiccola and Luciano Berio in Milan, Italy. He held residencies at Princeton University, the University of Illinois, and the University of York before emigrating to the United States in 1975; he became a U.S. citizen in 1983. In 1984, Rands's Canti del Sole, premiered by Paul Sperry, Zubin Mehta, and the New York Philharmonic, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He has since taught at the University of California, San Diego, the Juilliard School, Yale University, and Boston University. From 1988 to 2005 he taught at Harvard University, where he is Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music Emeritus.
Meriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was an American music academic and composer of contemporary classical music.
Ethel is a New York based string quartet that was co-founded in 1998 by Ralph Farris, viola; Dorothy Lawson, cello; Todd Reynolds, violin; and Mary Rowell, violin. Unlike most string quartets, Ethel plays with amplification and integrates improvisation into its performances. The group's current membership includes violinists Kip Jones and Corin Lee.
Theatre of Voices is a vocal ensemble founded by baritone Paul Hillier in 1990; it focuses on early music and new music.
Donald Nally is an American conductor, chorus master, and professor of conducting, specializing in chamber choirs, opera, and new music. He is conductor of the professional new-music choir, The Crossing, based in Philadelphia. He teaches graduate students at Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music.
NOTUS, formerly the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, is the only university-based vocal group in the United States exclusively dedicated to the study and performance of vocal and choral repertoire written after 1900. It includes singers, composers, young scholars and instrumentalists chosen for their special interest in the music of our time. Depending on the repertoire, the ensemble adjusts its size to perform solo vocal, chamber choral and large oratorio-like compositions.
Bryce David Dessner is an American composer and guitarist based in Paris, as well as a member of the rock band the National. Dessner's twin brother, Aaron is also a member of the group. Together, they write the music in collaboration with lead singer and lyricist Matt Berninger.
Volti is a 16- to 24-person professional vocal ensemble based in San Francisco, focused on the commissioning and performance of new music. In 2018, Volti became the first vocal group ever to have been awarded the Chorus America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming seven times. Volti has released four CDs on the innova label: "Turn the Page," "House of Voices," "This is what happened," and "the color of there seen from here," released April 26, 2019. Volti also appears with the Kronos Quartet on their Grammy Award winning recording of Sun Rings by American minimalist composer Terry Riley.
Carol Edith Barnett is an American composer. She was born in Dubuque, Iowa, and studied at the University of Minnesota with Dominick Argento and Paul Fetler (composition), Bernard Weiser (piano) and Emil J. Niosi (flute). She graduated with a bachelor's degree in music theory and composition in 1972 and a masters in theory and composition in 1976.
Kenji Bunch is an American composer and violist. Bunch currently serves as the artistic director of Fear No Music and teaches at Portland State University, Reed College, and for the Portland Youth Philharmonic. He is also the director of MYSfits, the most advanced string ensemble of the Metropolitan Youth Symphony.
Ars Nova Copenhagen is a Danish vocal ensemble specialised in the interpretation of the polyphonic choral music of the Renaissance and new vocal music. It was founded in 1979 by composer Bo Holten among others. In 1996 Hungarian conductor Tamás Vetö was appointed chief conductor by the singers in the group and Holten founded his own ensemble, Musica Ficta (Denmark). Ars Nova Copenhagen is now led by Paul Hillier, and collaborates on a regular basis with his ensemble Theatre of Voices.
Kirsten Soriano was born April 19, 1979. She is an American composer from White Bear Lake, Minnesota. Her music has been performed by the Kronos Quartet string quartet, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW Ensemble, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, The Crossing choral ensemble, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente and the Jack Quartet string quartet. In 2013, she was appointed assistant professor at the University of North Texas and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2020. She has served as director of undergraduate studies in the college of music at the University of North Texas since 2018.
Spektral Quartet is a string quartet based in Chicago comprising Clara Lyon (violin), Theo Espy (violin), Doyle Armbrust (viola) and Russell Rolen (cello). It is the ensemble-in-residence at the University of Chicago's Department of Music, where it has served since 2012.
Andrea Clearfield is an American composer of contemporary classical music. Regularly commissioned and performed by ensembles in the United States and abroad, her works include music for orchestra, chorus, soloists, chamber ensembles, dance, opera, film, and multimedia collaborations.
The Fifth Century is a classical and choral studio album by Gavin Bryars, conducted by Donald Nally, and performed by The Crossing choir with the saxophone quartet PRISM. This album was released in the label ECM New Series in November 2016. The album won the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance.
Kile Smith is an American composer of choral, vocal, orchestral, and chamber music. The Arc in the Sky with The Crossing received a 2020 Grammy nomination for Best Choral Performance, and the Canticle CD by Cincinnati's Vocal Arts Ensemble helped win the 2020 Classical Producer of the Year Grammy for Blanton Alspaugh. A Black Birch in Winter, which includes Smith's Where Flames a Word, won the 2020 Estonian Recording of the Year for Voces Musicales.