Cosmos 7 - Tidal Music with ENAensemble

Performed on November 4, 2023 at Cherry Street Pier as part of the "Seeing the Anthropocene" (www.staphilly....) curated by Julia Clift.
This is a 28-minute long guided improvisation that follows the cycles of the moon and the tides as they exist at Cherry Street Pier starting the night of the performance. It is scored for voice using bullhorn, flute, cello, and electronics, and accompanies and responds to Austen Camille's "Here, twice a day, we are held by the ocean."
The performers are Nicole Renna (voice), Chelsea Meynig (flute), and Evan Kassof (cello).
More info at:
www.staphilly....
www.enaensembl...
evankassof.com/
Full Program Notes:
First, I want to thank Austen Camille and Julia Clift for this amazing project, Seeing the Anthropocene. It's an inspiring curatorial endeavor, and frankly, I imagine a challenging process to face the world we've made. We are honored to be a part of it and to make art this beautiful with people so wonderful!
Second, we're ENAensemble, we're a Philly based new music/opera group that produces new opera with and by emerging artists, focused on ensuring our community--the musicians and artists we work with--are free to be wild and true to their artistic visions. I'n short, as long as it tells a story with the voice, we will give it a shot!
Third, Cosmos 7 - Tidal Music, is a 28 minute long guided improvisation for the three of us and electronics you'll hear over the PA. Nicole is the moon, we are the earth, and there are more than just tides happening. We follow one cycle of the moon, whose rising and setting is timed in the piece to start tonight, November 4. In response to the cycles, tides, push and pull, and heaving of the forces driving all nature on earth, we make music.
Life exists because of the moon, because of the way gravity makes it the arm grinding the pestle that is the earth's core against the mortar that is the earth's crust. The friction this makes heats the hydrothermal vents at the bottom the sea where life first began. The friction shapes the continents, the climate, and the cycles of life, death, and renewal. Until the Anthropocene, save for a rogue asteroid here or there, no other force has come close to reshaping these cycles.
What we have done, to turn the earth, slowly progressing through 4.5 billion years of change and stability, into a violent, uncompromising, cruel, and exploitive hot house is almost impossible to comprehend. We have replaced the moon's power with our own machinery, and through it we have stolen life and breath from the world, leaving only crumbs to objectify through pornographic parks and earnest artistic reframings.
Nevertheless, these efforts matter. Every park, every sea side, every pier and piece of art therein, reminds us of what nature is, not because we've saved what little is left, but because those bits are the seeds of what CAN be. So, as we anthropomorphize the moon and the oceans and the tides and the earth, we ask that you remember that those are the very things that have anthropomorphized us. That us being here now, a hundred or so feet into the Delaware River, is the result of a continuous, billions years-long process of becoming ever so slightly more human. And that now, more than ever, as we stand on the precipice of the annihilation of that process by our own hands, we take direct, concerted, and solidaristic action to change our ways. Living in the Anthropocene means being born with an inheritance of destruction, listening to the human voice mediated through a bullhorn, and having the choice to perpetuate or not.
Let's not.