The Tacoma Method

The Tacoma Method

Sarah Ioannides-Project-Romeo and Juliet

The Tacoma Method 

Music by Gregory Youtz

Rosemary Ponnekanti for South Sound Magazine

Saturday night Symphony Tacoma continued their 76th season with their third Classics concert, Reconciliation, and premiered a suite of music from Tacoma Method, a new opera from local composer Gregory Youtz and Chinese poet and librettist Zhang Er.

Symphony Tacoma executed Youtz’s new score beautifully. Tacoma Method’s instrumentation blended the sounds of Eurocentric and Chinese instruments, expressing musically the mix of Tacoma’s cultures. The Symphony Tacoma Voices also put up an outstanding performance of this new work, no doubt in thanks to Dr. Geoffrey Boers’ hard work in preparation and rehearsal. However, the true star of the evening was Hai-Ting Chinn. A commanding stage presence, her powerful conveyance of emotion forced those in attendance to feel the plight of the displaced Chinese before they were loaded on train cars at gunpoint and railroaded away from their home forever, in what would become known as the Tacoma Method.

Once we returned from intermission, we were treated to one of the greats of the Romantic era. Ever a stalwart champion of modern music (such as Tacoma Method), Maestra Sarah Ioannides once again demonstrated her mastery of the classics with her world-class showing of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony. Ioannides deftly led the orchestra as the melody of the first movement interweaved though strings, woodwinds, and horns, building to one of the great climaxes of the nineteenth century. The entire symphony was a brilliant lecture on ensemble playing, and the orchestra was a pleasure to listen to the whole evening.

Riots and Prayers

Riots and Prayers

Sarah Ioannides-Project-Romeo and Juliet

Riots and Prayers

Music by Daniel Bernard Roumain

Riots and Prayers is a work for large orchestra and an array of ‘Speakers’.

Speakers can speak in any language and be drawn from the local community; amateur or professional musicians; dancers, sign language artists, or any movement artists; painters or visual artists; pre-recorded video moments or live, on-line talking heads; members of the orchestra who would like to speak and/or play a short solo on their instrument; members of the Board or administrative staff; solo, small groups, singers, vocalists, or ensembles improvising their parts with the orchestra; the conductor or assistant conductor(s); young children or senior citizens; the able or disabled; or anyone who has a deep need to say or express themselves — with their orchestra — within a moment of music, trust, and collective expression.

Speaker for the world premiere featured speakers from the AFL-CIO, King Street Center, Outright VT, St. Albans & singer/songwriter Dwight Ritcher.

The Love Trilogy

The Love Trilogy

Sarah Ioannides-Project-Fire Mountain

Love Trilogy & Airborne lines and Rumbles

Music By Marie Samuelsson, performed with Malmö Symphony and Nordic Chamber Orchestra.

Composer Marie Samuelsson has in three orchestral works, The Love Trilogy for Orchestra, taken up the concept of love from different perspectives. The last part, The Eros Effect and Solidarity, will now have its American premiere. The piece contains musical quotes from Parts 1 and 2, but in a new context. The music fluctuates between vigorous lines and forward-driven collective sonorities, changing over to a more tentative, fragmentarily questioning and whispering music. Solidarity in collective movements and man ́s yearning for freedom are the themes here. The texts are inspired by The Eros Effect -the title of an article by George N. Katsiaficas about how human emotions can be gathered into affectionate, collective and social peace movements, characterised by solidarity.

The Nordic Chamber Orchestra, with Sarah Ioannides conducting, premiered the work in October 2016 in the city of Sundsvall in northern Sweden. Part 1, Aphrodite –Fragments by Sappho, was composed for mezzosoprano and orchestra and contains texts about sensual love. Part 2, the clarinet concerto A New Child of Infinity, has the love of a child as a theme and is dedicated to Marie Samuelsson ́s two sons. The music is published by Gehrmans Musikförlag.

 

Bleeding Pines

Bleeding Pines

Sarah Ioannides-Project-Fire Mountain

Bleeding Pines

Music By David Serkin Ludwig

Songs from the Bleeding Pines is an oratorio for singers, chorus, and orchestra based on a play by Ray Owen. The play tells the story of conservationist Helen Boyd Dull, who in 1904, saved an ancient stand of longleaf pines after encountering workers bleeding the trees of their resin for the turpentine industry. Once among the greatest forests, 90 million acreas of longleaf were lost to logging and turpentining by the early 1900s. The trees that Helen preserved are now the world’s oldest longleaf pines, surviving because of her faith and commitment – a traveler who fell in love with the woods and fervently protected the land.

“The Bleeding Pines” is altogether a powerful, painterly piece, starkly conveying both the destruction and the hope of salvation that humans hold over nature and themselves.” – Rosemary Ponnekanti, Sound Magazine

 

Fire-Mountain

Fire-Mountain

Sarah Ioannides-Project-Fire Mountain

Fire-Mountain

Music By Dan Ott & Film by Derek Klein

“…a culmination of creativity, education, outreach and advocacy that touched our community and brought people together in a powerful shared experience”.-John Falksow, Tacoma Tribune

An environmental commission and a multimedia experience featuring video, glass art and music. A symposium exploring changes to the delicate ecosystem of the mountain and its glaciers. A collaboration between the performing and visual arts and the National Park Service. A once-in-a-lifetime educational opportunity for area high school students.

Conceived by Sarah Ioannides and commissioned by Symphony Tacoma, this was a collaborative effort between Symphony Tacoma, Museum of Glass, Hilltop Artists and Mount Rainier National Park to create a cross-disciplinary multimedia artistic event culminating with the Symphony’s season finale. Commemorating the Centennial of the National Parks System, the project engaged area residents in music and glass art and raised awareness of the plight of Mount Rainier’s glaciers, which are melting at an alarming rate.

This multifaceted commission was featured in Symphony Magazine’s article, “Mission: Commission” in Winter 2019.

“Symphony Tacoma’s community engagement was multi-pronged for Fire-Mountain, which commemorated the centennial of the National Park Service. The ambitious project conceived by Ioannides had involved 155 performers and multiple organizations, including the National Park Service. For example, orchestra students from a local high school explored Mount Rainier on snowshoes, where they learned about the glacial ecosystem and heard from the composer about his creative pro­cess. At a panel discussion prior to the world premiere, the conductor, composer, a climatologist,and a National Park deputy discussed the effects of climate change on the mountain”. ~Symphony Magazine

“Fire Mountain” ended in an elongated, disintegrating diminuendo. The violin sections melted into a single thread of sound, and their whisper faded into profound silence. This silence clung on for a long time. It seemed that nobody in the Pantages Theater wanted this moment to end. The silence broke, and the audience launched into an immediate standing ovation”. ~Tacoma Tribune

 

Ten Minutes of Eternal Light

Ten Minutes of Eternal Light

Sarah Ioannides-project-Saxophone Fusion

Ten Minutes of Eternal Light

A clarinet melody. Staccato octaves on electric piano. Drawings. Poetry. Children.

If this doesn’t sound like an average symphony piece, then you’re absolutely right — and that’s what makes Eternal Light special. Forged into a cohesive, sparkling whole from rough diamonds of poetry, art, and music by Tacoma’s young people, the multimedia piece premiered by Symphony Tacoma on YouTube last weekend isn’t just a pretty gem. It’s 10 minutes of a vision into a hopeful future from a troubled present, of a new musical order where classical instruments fuse with electronica and voices, and where light triumphs.

Eternal Light came into being from a call to Tacoma youth to submit music, dance, poetry, or art on the theme of “eternal light,” inspired by the ethereal “Lux Eterna” movement from Mozart’s Requiem. Predictably, symphony director Sarah Ioannides, whose creative idea this was, and who directed the project, received a stream of work that on the surface seems difficult to weave together (the prelude is a literal collage of these raw submissions over a pulsing beat).

But throw in some talented adults and the picture comes into focus. Electronic composer Will Scharnberg helped sculpt teenager Kevin Kernie’s percussive octaves and rolling minor 9ths into an arc of hope, minimalist but intriguing. Orchestrator Kim Scharnberg wove in simple parts for eight symphony musicians: violin, cello, oboe, clarinet, flute, horn, percussion, harp. Singers from the Tacoma Youth Chorus added backing.

Meanwhile, filmmaker Fernanda Lamuño took all those green-screened home or studio recordings, some stunning paintings and drawings by Audrey Hartman (Ioannides’ daughter) plus soaring poetry by Holly Pierce, and wove them into a luminous, dreamlike whole.

“Burning with words, called from the oceanside cliff” floats over masked friends on a beach, then a time-lapse of the artist herself. “Whisper words, said again, carried along by roaring winds, grown from lungs that breathe a saving breath” flows into actual singers, their breath supporting the music, alone yet together. Through all comes visions of Ioannides conducting, wreathed in a smile and a swirling, green-blue background.

The theme of “music…replacing what I lost” drives with the fast, fluid rhythm against images of stars wheeling high over Tacoma and through the outline of a human face. Finally, the eternity ends with a pinnacle of a staccato piano octave and finger cymbal, and a feeling that yes, we will get past this present time into something better, more innovative, as yet unimagined except maybe by these imaginative young people in our midst.

But don’t stop there. The beauty of online concerts is the chance you get to explore the context behind them. Side by side on the YouTube channel is a delightful behind-the-scenes video, playfully edited, showing the creative process (lots of Zoom sessions), Ioannides coaching her young singers (more Zoom), recording bloopers and triumphs, and some very thoughtful reflections by everyone involved on what they learned from this project.

What would Mozart, making a cameo visual and musical appearance in the prelude, have thought of all this? Probably sheer delight that other young people like him were pouring out, some 250 years later, that same eternal musical light.

Eternal Light can be viewed on the Symphony Tacoma YouTube channel.