Aliro Voices premieres Michael Maiorana’s new composition Relief, for choir and violin

Aliro Voices will host a live remote performance of Michael Maiorana’s new composition Relief, for SATB choir and violin. The performance will be livestreamed on Sunday, August 30th from 7:30pm-8:00pm central time, followed by a short Q+A.

Relief is an 8 movement piece with text from a speech by Harry Hopkins, director of the WPA and Secretary of Commerce under FDR. Hopkins’ 1936 speech affirms and reaffirms the importance of dignity in social welfare and the necessity of a society to care for all its members.  It was delivered 84 years ago, but this text feels very resonant in this moment and pertinent to some of today’s overlapping crises of livable wages, affordable housing, and especially massive unemployment and the relief packages being debated in Congress. The excerpted portions of the speech used in this composition highlight these parallels.

This piece will be performed live over the internet, with each singer in their own home singing into their computer. The music is written specifically for the emerging medium of live remote music, so all the musical elements can be slightly out of sync with each other due to variable internet lag while still working together. Many elements of the composition are open to interpretation by the individual performers, all within a framework controlled by the conductor. I’m grateful to the recent pioneering work done in this new and experimental medium by C4, Isaac Lovdahl, and many others. Thank you.

This project is funded by an ACF create grant from the American Composers Forum with funds from the Jerome Foundation. https://composersforum.org/programs/acf-create/