Reich – The Desert Music

A special multimedia collaboration for the El Paso Symphony’s 75th anniversary season. Conceived by Ioannides for El Paso Symphony and El Paso Chorale, Sarah directed a 50-minute film, produced by El Paso native Zach Passero, that celebrates the local desert landscape, including White Sands, to accompany Steve Reich’s “The Desert Music” for orchestra and amplified voices.

The film shot beautiful footage of the desert, both day and night, as well as a clip of the bombing of Pearl Harbor as a reminder White Sands was used as a testing base for the missiles. The film creates a poignant look at both the natural beauty of the desert and juxtaposes the conflicts that lie within it on human intervention; the desert space was used to create weapons of mass destruction.