The small Philadelphia choir The Crossing and its director, Donald Nally, have shown that contemporary music specialists can succeed with carefully selected repertory that connects with audiences. A case in point is this work by composer Lansing McLoskey, whose background is in punk rock but whose compositional style shows little effect of that. Instead, he crafts a neotonal idiom that gradually intensifies and becomes edgier as the work proceeds and the idea expressed in the texts deepen. And what texts they are! The work ...
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The small Philadelphia choir The Crossing and its director, Donald Nally, have shown that contemporary music specialists can succeed with carefully selected repertory that connects with audiences. A case in point is this work by composer Lansing McLoskey, whose background is in punk rock but whose compositional style shows little effect of that. Instead, he crafts a neotonal idiom that gradually intensifies and becomes edgier as the work proceeds and the idea expressed in the texts deepen. And what texts they are! The work is based on a set of poems called Twelve Canticles for the Zealot by Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, lamenting the rise of intolerance and fanaticism in Nigeria and elsewhere around the world. McLoskey combines those with excerpts from Soyinka's other writings, including interviews, lectures, and speeches as well as his memoir The Man Died . The cumulative effect is to draw links between contemporary religious fanaticism and the legacies of other forms of repression, and...
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