Students and faculty of the School of Music performance studios present music from across the ages in this digital-only concert series, special for Spring 2020.
Sorrow (2020)
UW Modern Band
Elias Hampton and Ronan Delisle, guitars
Micah Ritchie, drums
Alexander Chadsey, piano
Tony Lefaive, bass
Brad Schrandt, saxophone
Program Note
This piece, "Sorrow", is a collage of improvisations tracked remotely during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown. Drummer Micah Ritchie issued some parameters for all us to improvise within, which involved using household items as percussion and a tone-row for generating melodic and harmonic material. Elias Hampton then compiled everyone's individual performances and mixed it into a cohesive work. I (Ronan) had become inspired by a 35mm camera emulator for the iPhone around the time of the lockdown, and since I could feel no tangible manifestations of the situation around me in my quiet North Seattle neighborhood, I decided to document some of the art that was being made on Capitol Hill. When George Floyd was murdered, there was an emerging situation in the form of protests in demonstrations that felt to me like they needed to be documented in the same way. Though they are superficially unrelated, COVID-19 and the issues of systemic violence toward people of color both address the failures deep at the core of our society. We are now forced to reckon with ourselves as individuals participating in these systemic failures and with the society as a whole that we've created for ourselves. –Ronan Delisle