As the year draws to a close, we think of new beginnings, the year that is to come, and the potential that it holds. The Christmas story, of young parents welcoming their miraculous child to the world, captures that joy, hope and wonder for the future. We take that lens, specifically of “mother and child,” as our point of departure for our first concert of the season. Through the music of Dieterich Buxtehude, Jocelyn Hagen, and Bobby McFerrin, we ask questions examining the human and the divine in the Christmas story, and remember that we were born, too.
The passing moments of our lives can seem to disappear into the river of time. What is it, then, that allows us to hold onto the memories we want to cling to? What happens when our memory fails us? Our second concert offers a chance to consider the arrow of time: the one-way direction of our experience on this earth, and the challenges of memory. Join us in asking, alongside composers Heinrich Isaac, Ēriks Ešenvalds, Kile Smith, and Ayanna Woods, how do we commemorate loss, joy, nostalgia, or regret?
If the earth remembers everything, what will it remember about us—and will it remember that we learned how to care? In collaboration with the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra, we close our season with the premiere of an NWCC co-commission, What the Earth Remembers. The oratorio by Shawn E. Okpebholo with text by Marcus Amaker, explores creation care in a time of climate crisis. Moving from childlike wonder to collective reckoning, it traces a world of rising heat, vanishing life, and the fragile, often fractured relationship between humanity and the natural world. Through images of water, root systems, and memory, it reflects on how the earth holds our stories, both the harm we have done and the responsibility we carry.
When we consider our place and our purpose in the world, we often think about memory, legacy, and the composite of experiences that have led up to the present moment. This season, taking its name from Marcel Proust’s seminal twentieth-century masterwork In Search of Lost Time, we consider how memory grips us, inspires us, transforms us, and informs us. We live in the questions of what change does to us, how our past wells up into our present or even our future, and what our legacy will be. Driven by music and poetry about family, wonder, loss, despair, and human connection, we ask: Does Change truly Transform us? Is it more painful to Forget than to Remember? Can Memory call us to Action?
