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About the Score

What Color Is the Dawn? is a piece that I have hoped to write for many years. The inspiring experience of taking part in the inaugural PREMIERE|Project Festival, hosted by the Choral Arts Initiative of Newport Beach in June 2018, gave me the opportunity to write this first part of what I plan to turn into a four movement cantata.

The words were written by my friend, Klara Wojtkowska, a violinist and author, who spent a year traveling the world on a Watson Fellowship. She sent out travel diaries to a list of friends, and something about her writings during her time in South Africa struck me as both innately musical, and powerfully connective. I immediately asked her permission to set her text. In particular, her recounting of an impromptu meeting of cultures, in which a jazz trio from Norway is joined onstage by an enthusiastic local member of the audience, will form the emotional centerpiece of the cantata as a whole, leading to the climactic idea: "Sometimes I am again convinced that there is nothing in the world as wonderful as music." First Performance: June 15th, 2018, PREMIERE|Project Festival St. Mark Presbyterian Church, Newport Beach, CA Choral Arts Initiative; Brandon Elliott, conductor

Featured on the Choral Arts Initiative Series on MusicSpoke.

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