Applications open in fall of 2023
N.E.O. VOICE FESTIVAL 2023
Out of the (Voice) Box
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Saturday, June 24, 2023 @ 7 pm
Sanctuary, First Congregational Church of Los Angeles The annual opening night Out of the (Voice) Box concert features leading creative artists from the N.E.O. roster performing their new solo and small ensemble vocal works. This concert is as hard to underestimate as it is to describe. Around a dozen searching vocal and organ artists from different background stretching the boundaries of their practice and culminating in a salon-style offering within a familial-supportive atmosphere. There is nothing quite like this annual event. View Concert Program |
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Immersive StimmungWednesday, June 28, 2023 @ 7 pm (6 pm)
Demystification begins at 6 pm for those who want to be immersed An immersive musical experience based on Karlheinze Stockhausen's "Stimmung" Created by David Harris, Fahad Siadat and Laurel Irene Sanctuary, First Congregational Church of Los Angeles Featuring HEX The “Immersive Stimmung” experience begins with a six-person ensemble playing Stockhausen’s piece. From there, the work expands to envelop listeners into the sonic space elicited by their own vocalizations. “Stimmung” has a mystical and distant aura to it, and often feels untouchable. In “Immersive Stimmung” participants are guided into this mystical aura to discover and create through the voices of the lead ensemble. Those wishing to participate in the immersive aspects of the concert are invited to the demystification ceremony an hour prior to the concert. |
2023 ExplOratorio: Recurrence
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July 1, 2023 @ 7 pm
Sanctuary, First Congregational Church of Los Angeles Each festival culminates with the annual Exploratorio concert that premieres a new major work written and performed by N.E.O. composers and singers. N.E.O.’s 2023 thematic launch point is that of Recurrence: a deliciously, inspiringly-cyclical cocktail of philosophical and poetic threads that unravel into one another over and again. Fantastically, the conversation around recurrence tends to repeat itself quickly and often. As soon as we get our heads around part of it, we lose sight of the rest. Short of absolute acceptance, which has historically led to some interesting and often disastrous outcomes, recurrence is a concept that doesn’t settle well, and therefore is well-suited for creative expression. Our composers responded in a range of ways from aleatory, to vocally-extending instrument, to vocal and organ density, to spareness, and a wide range of timbral expressions. The texts they set invite us into deep and cyclical spaces that lead us into a multiverse of listening potentials. |
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N.E.O. VOICE FESTIVAL 2022
Out of the (Voice) Box
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Saturday, June 25, 2022 @ 7 pm
Sanctuary, First Congregational Church of Los Angeles The annual opening night Out of the (Voice) Box concert features leading creative artists from the N.E.O. roster performing their new solo and small ensemble vocal works. This concert is as hard to underestimate as it is to describe. Around a dozen searching vocal and organ artists from different background stretching the boundaries of their practice and culminating in a salon-style offering within a familial-supportive atmosphere. There is nothing quite like this annual event. View Concert Program
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2022 ExplOratorio: The Signified
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Saturday, July 2, 2022 @ 7 pm
Sanctuary, First Congregational Church of Los AngelesThe concept of “The Signified” comes from the study of language and meaning known as semiotics. In one iteration, semiotics includes three categories, the sign (symbols like words and icons that hold place for things and experiences), the signifier (the meaning we give to something), and the signified (the thing itself). I still remember the first time I read about these distinctions in Marshall Mcluhan's The Medium Is The Message. The clarity and order I found in the world once I thought to look for the existence of the thing itself as separate from the meaning I gave to it and the symbols I used to hold place for it opened my understanding of the world. The N.E.O. composer’s prompt was to explore what these distinctions might mean to them artistically, and it became the core of the festival week. In the hands of the N.E.O. composers, we have been graced with a great many creative explorations of the concept. As with each N.E.O. team before them, they have opened windows into consciousness for us all, and uplifted our humanity through the energy of their songs. View Concert Program
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N.E.O. VOICE FESTIVAL 2021
Out of the (Voice) Box
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Tuesday, July 13, 2021 @ 5:30 pm
Virtual Premiere The annual opening night Out of the (Voice) Box concert features leading creative artists from the N.E.O. roster performing their new solo and small ensemble vocal works. This concert is as hard to underestimate as it is to describe. Around a dozen searching vocal and organ artists from different background stretching the boundaries of their practice and culminating in a salon-style offering within a familial-supportive atmosphere. There is nothing quite like this annual event. |
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2021 ExplOratorio: The Passions
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Saturday, July 17, 2021 @ 5:30 pm
Virtual Premiere In the oratorio tradition, the Passion exists as a subgenre that includes diverse examples like Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” and Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar.” That Passion story can be thought of as compassion on trial. The 2021 NEO Exploratorio, titled “The Passions,” inspired a months-long conversation around a word “passion” whose meaning has occupied many different rooms across time, but has always been infused with powerful energy. In the end, the 2021 Exploratorio became a story of compassion with wings, a kaleidoscope of the human ability to love during a year of isolation. As such, “The Passions'' explores suffering in the self as a portal to understanding suffering in others. Each movement, in its individual way, strains with the promise that this suffering can find relief. N.E.O.’s “Passions” is a collective story of the individual in a unique time when individuality in the pressure cooker of aloneness brought us closer to ourselves. It is the promise that art, the practice of creating, has the power to turn us toward compassion, and in the process, redeem us and our world. View Concert Program
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N.E.O. VOICE FESTIVAL 2020
Out of the (Voice) Box
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Friday, July 24, 2020 @ 5:30 pm
Virtual Premiere The annual opening night Out of the (Voice) Box concert features leading creative artists from the N.E.O. roster performing their new solo and small ensemble vocal works. This concert is as hard to underestimate as it is to describe. Around a dozen searching vocal and organ artists from different background stretching the boundaries of their practice and culminating in a salon-style offering within a familial-supportive atmosphere. There is nothing quite like this annual event. |
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2020 ExplOratorio: The New Morality Play
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Saturday, July 25, 2020 @ 5:30 pm
Virtual Premiere The original morality plays were Medieval dramatic allegories that taught culturally relevant notions of right and wrong through a religious lens. The New Morality Play musically explores how we weigh and value moral concepts of good and evil in the 21st Century. Has morality changed over the centuries and how does it relate to previous or modern notions of sacredness or religiosity? Do our concepts of right and wrong translate into perceptions of good and bad art? How do we reconcile our idealistic morals with the realities of the world we live in today? Does morality actually exist? The New Morality Play uses art to question human values, how they evolve or remain fixed, and examine what it means to look for the truth, whether it be personal or universal. |
N.E.O. VOICE FESTIVAL 2019
2019 ExplOratorio: The Origins Of Creativity
Saturday, August 10, 2019 @ 7:00 pm
Sanctuary, First Congregational Church of Los Angeles
The Origins Of Creativity” explores the creative life, reflecting both on the long term experience of living artistically, and on the short term experience of fulfilling inspiration by making something new. The piece begins with a frustrated question through the words of William Blake: “why do things promised feel so empty?” Treble voices, as if distant angelic hosts, pass that question to the basses and tenors whose private idea, a response to the question, surfaces only to be mocked and derided in “You Told”. The ensemble then screams in frustration before responding with what seems like nonsense in “Tentative Arrangements”, but what is, in reality, so highly structured as to obfuscate the underlying emotional conflicts, and then, we play. “Balloon Interludes” function throughout the work as a reminder that we “play” music, we don’t “work” music. The release of exploration serves as ongoing inspiration. Claudia’s “he took the shape of a shaper” references a Finnish folktale in which a god creates music by building an instrument from the bones of a fish. From death comes potential, we have to release parts of our selves to find others, and the ensemble hears the story as if around a mythological campfire. “Variations On A Spectral Theme” opens with a conviction “I have decided to go”. The rest of the piece is based on a fractured version of this melody, broken into its spectral elements, a ray of hope that there is so much more around us there than we are aware of. “You are tired,” is a reminder that ups come with downs, yet, a recognition that creativity thrives on connection. This newfound voice is followed, in “palimpset III”, by the fear that it may not be enough, that someone else, or something else like artificial intelligence might displace what we have found. “The Breath Of Life” is a setting of the Hebrew creation myth as told by an African American poet James Weldon Johnson. It draws the close connection between creative inspiration and divinity through the life-giving essence of breath. After one last balloon exaltation, we realize that creating doesn’t mean coming up with something from nothing, but that new ideas build on old ones, which releases us into the very joyful human understanding that “it’s all been done before.” Now, we are ready. Ready to greet newness, emotion, connection, and play, as we end with “Introduction.
Sanctuary, First Congregational Church of Los Angeles
The Origins Of Creativity” explores the creative life, reflecting both on the long term experience of living artistically, and on the short term experience of fulfilling inspiration by making something new. The piece begins with a frustrated question through the words of William Blake: “why do things promised feel so empty?” Treble voices, as if distant angelic hosts, pass that question to the basses and tenors whose private idea, a response to the question, surfaces only to be mocked and derided in “You Told”. The ensemble then screams in frustration before responding with what seems like nonsense in “Tentative Arrangements”, but what is, in reality, so highly structured as to obfuscate the underlying emotional conflicts, and then, we play. “Balloon Interludes” function throughout the work as a reminder that we “play” music, we don’t “work” music. The release of exploration serves as ongoing inspiration. Claudia’s “he took the shape of a shaper” references a Finnish folktale in which a god creates music by building an instrument from the bones of a fish. From death comes potential, we have to release parts of our selves to find others, and the ensemble hears the story as if around a mythological campfire. “Variations On A Spectral Theme” opens with a conviction “I have decided to go”. The rest of the piece is based on a fractured version of this melody, broken into its spectral elements, a ray of hope that there is so much more around us there than we are aware of. “You are tired,” is a reminder that ups come with downs, yet, a recognition that creativity thrives on connection. This newfound voice is followed, in “palimpset III”, by the fear that it may not be enough, that someone else, or something else like artificial intelligence might displace what we have found. “The Breath Of Life” is a setting of the Hebrew creation myth as told by an African American poet James Weldon Johnson. It draws the close connection between creative inspiration and divinity through the life-giving essence of breath. After one last balloon exaltation, we realize that creating doesn’t mean coming up with something from nothing, but that new ideas build on old ones, which releases us into the very joyful human understanding that “it’s all been done before.” Now, we are ready. Ready to greet newness, emotion, connection, and play, as we end with “Introduction.