Evento

Crowning Day

Common Tone Arts Presents:
The Universal Language Project 2016-2017 Season

Crowning Day
Featuring the Skyros Quartet

"Crowning Day" is a bold five-movement multi-media work for string quartet, piano, and baritone voice/narrator by composer and photographer Marcus Oldham. This work tells a story of racial relations, from the perspectives of two former North Carolina plantations and other historical subjects, as time progresses through the colonial era, slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow segregation. This work will be a meditation upon what music and image can mean to the sacred journey towards racial reconciliation today.

The Universal Language Project is dedicated to creating artisan music through innovative and entertaining programming that can simultaneously push boundaries and dialogue with a mainstream public. Through multi-discipline collaboration and engaging musicians and composers from diverse backgrounds and eclectic genres, the Universal Language Project aspires to generate a body of music that can reach across generational divides, through geographic borders, and beyond spoken language and cultural difference.

L. Marcus Oldham, MMus., studied keyboard performance, musicology, and music theory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and music composition at Duke University, and the Eastman School of Music. His primary teachers were the composers Robert Ward, recipient of the 1962 Pulitzer Prize; and Samuel Adler, presently of the Julliard School of Music. Marcus is both a composer and an active performing artist, principally involved in Baroque and contemporary keyboard performance; and creating live and unique performance art.

The Skyros Quartet brings a bright and inventive style to the performance stage. Having recently relocated to the Seattle area, they can be seen performing, teaching, and leading community events in their new hometown. In addition to their work in the Pacific Northwest, Skyros has concertized across the US, Canada, and China.

The Skyros Quartet takes its name from the Greek isle of Skyros, one of a quartet of islands in the Aegean Sea.