2020 WINTER NEWSLETTER- Music of the Pacific Rim

From China to Hawaiʻi, Japan to California, PEBCC looks forward to exploring the diverse musical traditions and cultures of the Pacific Rim this spring. On Friday, March 13th at 7:30 pm, our leading performing choirs (Concert Choir, Ensemble, Ecco, and Ancora) will take the stage at First Congregational Church in Berkeley for an engaging program of virtuosic music-making that will delight, surprise, and inspire. Don’t miss the 7 pm pre-concert talk with composer Dr. Reed Criddle, whose new work “Quiet Enlightenment” will be premiered by Ensemble.

This year’s “Music of the Pacific Rim” program was inspired by the pan-Asian heritage of our new Artistic Director Eric Tuan, whose grandparents hail from China, Japan, and the Philippines. The program explores part of that heritage in Tuan’s haunting work nagasaki, a performance art piece that reflects on his grandmother’s experience as an atomic bomb survivor.

The concert also features the world premiere of a newly commissioned work by PEBCC alum Dr. Reed Criddle, currently Director of Choral Activities at Utah Valley University, who recently spent a year in Taiwanese monasteries studying the intricacies of Buddhist chant. Out of that study emerged his reflective work “Quiet Enlightenment,” which contrasts two poems on the theme of home from the Confucian and Buddhist traditions. Dr. Criddle will be working with Ensemble in the week prior to the concert and offering a pre-concert talk at 7 pm before the program begins.

Ecco will also be offering Dr. Criddle’s arrangement of a centuries-old Chinese folk melody, “Boat on Tai Lake,” which will feature the entrancing sounds of erhu player Anderson Wang. Wang, a member of the California Youth Chinese Symphony, plays a variety of traditional Chinese instruments including the erhu, gaohu, zhonghu, banhu and jinghu.

Another highlight of the program will be Ancora’s performance of two works by award-winning composer Tonia Ko, who was born in Hong Kong and raised in Hawaiʻi. Her first work, “Lost Queens,” reflects on the loss of two icons of indigenous Hawaiian culture: the monarchy, which was overthrown by US-backed sugar barons in 1893, and the ʻōʻō bird, whose yellow feathers were used to create capes for the nobility and which was driven to extinction by European collectors. The second, “Before Color,” imagines the world before the existence of the atmosphere, when there were no air molecules to refract light and create color. It draws its premise from the short story collection Cosmicomics by the Italian writer Italo Calvino, which spins fantastical tales from scientific facts.

Finally, Concert Choir will be bringing the Pacific Rim theme closer to home with two works by Bay Area composers. Our Associate Conductor Sue Bohlin’s piece In Anchor Bay describes her picturesque hometown on the Mendocino Coast: “salmon leap, while abalone hide in the deep blue waters.” We’ll also hear a work originally composed for Concert Choir by San Francisco-based composer Mark Winges, fog and a god, which sets a playful poem by Denise Newman with equally playful music.