You missed the concert, but some mp3s of the live performances will be here-->

Hear Matthew Greenbaum's Nameless  

Hear Maurice Wright's  overflowing stream  

Hear Mena Hanna's  At the Palazzo Vendramin 

Hear Ryan Olivier's American Gumbo

May 1,  2009

8PM

Advent Lutheran Church     93rd & Broadway, Manhattan

designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany

Cygnus & Momenta String Quartet, with sopranos
Elizabeth Farnum, Julie Bishop, and Priscilla Smith
with Conductor James Baker

Matthew Greenbaum's  Nameless for Cygnus + String Quartet and three sopranos

with the American premiere of string quartet fragment by Stephan Wolpe

Nameless bears an inscription from the single greatest work of Jewish Philosophy, The
Guide to the Perplexed of Moses Maimonides (1120-1190).

The Guide to the Perplexed, written in dialogue with Muslim theologians, argued the existence of Deity by negation:  Whatever is Deity can’t be described; what can be described is not Deity.  Hence, the title Nameless.

Nameless is a long, wordless psalm.  It is not descriptive; rather, it is a series of images—reflection, ecstasy, reverence, idyll and dance--expressed through fugue, chorus dialogue and aria.  These are signposts for the listener that point outward to musical expressions of the ineffable in every culture and time.

"The negative attributes have this in common with the positive, that they necessarily circumscribe the object to some extent, although such circumscription consists only in the exclusion of what otherwise would not be excluded.  In the following point, however, the negative attributes are distinguished from the positive. The positive attributes, although not peculiar to one thing, describe a portion of what we desire to know, either some part of its essence or some of its accidents; the negative attributes, on the other hand, do not, as regards the essence of the thing which we desire to know, in any way tell us what it is, except it be indirectly........"

Moses Maimonides,

Guide to the Perplexed   LVIII

with works for Cygnus:

Elliott Carter's     HBHH   (oboe solo)
Maurice Wrigth's  overflowing stream      (sextet for Cygnus)
Ryan Olivier's     American Gumbo     (sextet for Cygnus)
Mena Hanna's     The Swimmer    (Cygnus + soprano)
Melissa Pausina's  Promise  (for two guitars)

and works for the Momenta--

Stephan Wolpe      string quartet fragment--American premiere
Julia Alford Fowler    String Quartet No. 2