CHILDREN’S CHORUS OF WASHINGTON IS ONE OF SIX U.S. YOUTH CHOIRS TO PARTICIPATE IN EXPANDED RADIO RADIANCE™PROGRAM OF ADVENTUROUS NEW MUSIC

Chorus to Sing New Eve Beglarian Work Monday, June 14, 2010 with Miami Children’s Chorus

As part of its Radio Radiance™ partnership with the Young People’s Chorus of New York City (YPC), the Children’s Chorus of Washington will sing Eve Beglarian’s Machaut in the Machine Age VI: Liement Me Deport in concert (where and when?) and on radio station (where and when?). Radio Radiance™ is a radio/internet program created by the YPC to attract new listeners to new and innovative choral music. Machaut in the Machine Age VI: Liement me deport is one of four songs commissioned for Radio Radiance™ by the YPC. The others are by Gabriela Lena Frank, Meredith Monk, and Rob Kapilow with Fred Newman.

The Children’s Chorus of Washington is among the first of six local youth choruses to take part in the expansion of Radio Radiance™ to towns and cities throughout the United States. The others are the Anima- Young Singers of Chicago, the Ithaca Children’s Choir in Ithaca, New York; the Miami Children’s Chorus; the Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart Chamber Choir in Bellevue, Washington; and the Young People’s Chorus of Erie, Pennsylvania, a national affiliate of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.

Presented in collaboration with American Public Media and WNYC, New York Public Radio, the four Radio Radiance™ works were premiered in fall 2009 by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City on WNYC and on APM’s Performance Today program. In this next phase of Radio Radiance™, YPC is partnering with local choruses, schools, and radio stations in a grassroots effort to further attract new listeners to this adventurous and innovative choral music, which also happens to be fun to sing and listen to.

Like Eve Beglarian, medieval French composer Guillaume de Machaut was a cutting edge composer of his time and the greatest practitioner of music of the ars nova period, a stylistic period centered in France in the late middle ages. Ms. Beglarian loosely translates Liement me deport as “smile as though you are happy” and brings the music of the 14 th -century troubadour tradition into the 21st century with a contemporary “techno” feel.

The three other Radio Radiance™ compositions are Gabriela Lena Frank’s Two Mountain Songs, which incorporates iconic poetry and breathing techniques of Andean pan pipes to create a vocally descriptive recreation of South American folklore; Crosstown M42 by Rob Kapilow with mouth sounds artist Fred Newman, which takes listeners on a virtual bus ride from New York’s west to east sides, complete with squealing brakes, cooing pigeons, and steel drummers; and the fifth movement of Meredith Monk’s song cycle Three Heavens and Hells, based on a poem by a then-11-year-old Tennessee Reed, in which singers use vocal sounds and textures to create images and ideas that illuminate the music and texts.

Podcasts, listener guides, and interviews with the Radio Radiance™ composers are available from http://www.ypc.org/radioradiance/rrAudio.html