The Crossing Releases New Film Featuring David Lang’s protect yourself from infection

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PR Contact: Katy Salomon | Morahan Arts and Media
katy@morahanartsandmedia.com | 863.660.2214

The Crossing Releases A New Film Featuring
David Lang’s protect yourself from infection
Accompanying Performance Today's National Broadcast

Originally Conceived for the Mütter Museum’s September 2019 Spit Spreads Death
Parade Commemorating the Centennial of the Spanish Flu Pandemic

Watch The Film, protect yourself from infection

Film by Brett Snodgrass Features Artwork by Steven Bradshaw (Tenor of The Crossing) 
and Audio Recording Compiled and Produced by Paul Vazquez 
Film Conceived and Conducted by Donald Nally

“America’s most astonishing choir hates sounding pretty” – The New York Times

www.crossingchoir.org 
 

Philadelphia, PA (April 27, 2020) — Today, GRAMMY-winning choir The Crossing, led by Donald Nally, releases a new film featuring David Lang’s protect yourself from infection, a work commissioned by the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia for their September 2019 parade and new, permanent Spit Spreads Death exhibition commemorating the centennial of the 1918-19 Spanish Influenza pandemic. Performance Today will broadcast the new recording of Lang’s protect yourself from infection on more than 280 public radio stations nationwide this week. The film is conceived by conductor Donald Nally, with a film by Brett Snodgrass based on artwork of founding Crossing tenor Steven Bradshaw and audio compiled and produced by The Crossing’s sound designer Paul Vazquez.

The subject matter of David Lang’s protect yourself from infection closely echoes the current state of global affairs, specifically at a time when America is faced with difficult decisions regarding the reopening of states during the global COVID-19 pandemic, a dilemma that has been most closely compared to the 1918-19 Spanish Influenza epidemic which killed 50 to 100 million people worldwide. Philadelphia’s ill-fated Liberty Loan Parade, a patriotic wartime effort on September 28, 1918, went forward despite warnings from medical experts; it caused Philadelphia to have the highest death rate of any major American city during the pandemic. Nearly 14,000 people died in six weeks, one death every five minutes; more than 17,500 died in six months. 

Lang says, “The parade was infamous because it was held in spite of the medical advice that people needed to isolate themselves, and because of this it became a major local vector for the spread of the disease. Completely coincidentally, I am named after a relative of blessed memory who died in that epidemic. Jews often name their children with the initials of relatives who have died - I am David Avery Lang, named after my father's cousin, Daniel Abraham Leibowitz. My Leibowitz ancestors had only fairly recently arrived in America from Lithuania. Young Daniel Abraham turned 18 and enlisted in the army, and was sent to boot camp in Georgia, where he got sick and died. He meant a lot to the family, because he was living proof of the deep and real commitment of the new immigrants to the United States. His enlistment meant that they would belong here, and his death rattled them all so much that they were still mourning him when I was born, 38 years later. 

For my piece I wrote two kinds of music that coexist, separately. There is a kind of musical motto, sung by The Crossing and conducted by Donald Nally, which I made out of a health manual that the United States put out at the time of the epidemic, called 'Protect Yourself from Infection.' Over this motto, individual singers of The Crossing take turns singing solo melodies that I made out of both the individual names of Philadelphians who died from the epidemic and the individual names of Philadelphians who worked in healthcare during the epidemic, caring for the sick.”

Nally added, “When we recorded the raw materials of protect yourself from infection last summer, we could not have imagined these words would resonate in our lives; in fact, the words seemed somewhat innocent and naive. Now, they are our words, our lives; and we live, as our ancestors in Philadelphia of a century ago, at the hands of an irresponsible government – now on a national level. For us, this brings new weight to David’s composition and inspired us to create a kind of reincarnation of protect yourself from infection from those raw materials – a marriage of sound and sight that we hope reaches the viewer with the same care with which it was recorded and created, having health care workers in our minds, friends and family in our hearts, and millions of neighbors we don’t know in our thoughts.”

The Mütter Museum’s Spit Spreads Death exhibition explores how neighborhoods in Philadelphia were impacted, how the disease spread, and what could happen in future pandemics. On September 28, 2019, facilitated by the internationally renowned artist group Blast Theory and local community health organizations, the Mütter Museum invited the Philadelphia community at large to participate in a parade to memorialize the Philadelphia victims of the influenza pandemic. The Crossing’s recording of Lang’s protect yourself from infection premiered at the parade, where it could be heard through the mobile phones of hundreds of participants. 

About The Crossing
The Crossing is a GRAMMY-winning professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for choir that explore and expand ways of writing for choir, singing in choir, and listening to music for choir. Many of its over 100 commissioned premieres address social, environmental, and political issues. With a commitment to recording its commissions, The Crossing has issued 20 releases, receiving two GRAMMY Awards for Best Choral Performance (2018, 2019), and five GRAMMY nominations in four years.

The Crossing collaborates with some of the world’s most accomplished ensembles and artists, including the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, Network for New Music, Lyric Fest, Piffaro, Tempesta di Mare Baroque Chamber Orchestra, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, Toshimaru Nakamura, the Annenberg Center, Beth Morrison Projects, Dolce Suono, Allora & Calzadilla, Pig Iron Theatre Company, The Rolling Stones, and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), with whom they have appeared at Miller Theatre of Columbia University in the American premiere of James Dillon’s Nine Rivers, Peak Performances at Montclair State University, The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., and the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. The Crossing joined Bang on a Can for its first Philadelphia Marathon. Similarly, The Crossing often collaborates with some of the world’s most prestigious venues and presenters, such as the Park Avenue Armory, the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania, National Sawdust, David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Haarlem Choral Bienalle in The Netherlands, The Kennedy Center in Washington, the Philadelphia Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Delaware Museum of Art, Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space in New York, the WNYC Winter Garden, and Duke, Northwestern, Rowan, Salisbury, Colgate, and Notre Dame Universities. In 2014, they premiered John Luther Adams’ Sila: the breath of the world at Lincoln Center with Jack Quartet and eighth blackbird. The Crossing holds an annual residency at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Montana where they are working on an extensive, multi-year project with composer Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison. Their concerts are broadcast regularly on WRTI 90.1FM, Philadelphia’s Classical and Jazz Public Radio.

The Crossing’s recordings of Robert Convery and Benjamin Boyle’s Voyages (August 2019, Innova) and Kile Smith’s The Arc in the Sky (July 2019, Navona) were both nominated for 2020 GRAMMY Awards for Best Choral Performance. Lansing McLoskey's Zealot Canticles won the 2019 GRAMMY and Thomas Lloyd’s Bonhoeffer (Albany 2016) was nominated for the 2017 GRAMMY, both as Best Choral Performance. The Crossing’s collaboration with PRISM, Gavin Bryars’ The Fifth Century (ECM, October 2016), was the winner of the 2018 GRAMMY Award for Best Choral Performance and named one of The Chicago Tribune’s Top 10 Classical CDs of 2016.

The Crossing, with Donald Nally, was the American Composers Forums’ 2017 Champion of New Music. The Crossing’s 2014 commission Sound from The Bench by Ted Hearne was named a 2018 Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. They were the recipient of the 2015 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence, three ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, as well as the Dale Warland Singers Commission Award (with composer Joel Puckett) from Chorus America. Learn more at www.crossingchoir.org 

About David Lang
Passionate, prolific, and complicated, composer David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention. Lang is at the same time deeply versed in the classical tradition and committed to music that resists categorization, constantly creating new forms.

Lang is one of America's most performed composers. His catalogue is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling and very emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music — even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike. 

Lang's works are performed around the globe by the BBC Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, eighth blackbird, Santa Fe Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the Netherlands Chamber Choir, the Boston Symphony, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, the Kronos Quartet and many others; and at festivals and venues such as Lincoln Center, the Southbank Centre, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Barbican Centre, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Tanglewood, the BBC Proms, MusicNOW festival, The Munich Biennale, the Settembre Musica Festival, the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival and the Almeida, Holland, Berlin, Adelaide and Strasbourg Festivals. His music is used regularly for ballet and modern dance around the world by such choreographers as Twyla Tharp, the Paris Opera Ballet, the New York City Ballet, Susan Marshall, Edouard Lock, La La La Human Steps, The Netherlands Dance Theater, and Benjamin Millepied, who choreographed a new piece by Lang for the LA Dance Project at BAM in 2014.

Lang is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, a GRAMMY Award, an OBIE Award for Best New American Work, a Bessie Award, Musical America's Composer of the Year, Carnegie Hall's Debs Composer's Chair, the Rome Prize, the BMW Music-Theater Prize (Munich), and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York's legendary music collective Bang on a Can. His work has been recorded on the Sony Classical, Harmonia Mundi, Teldec, BMG, Point, Chandos, Argo/Decca, and Cantaloupe labels, among others. His music is published by Red Poppy Music (ASCAP) and Ricordi/Universal Music Classical. Learn more at https://davidlangmusic.com/. 

About Brett Snodgrass
Video producer Brett Snodgrass has 30 years of experience designing for a wide range of genres: film and television, theater, opera, Industrial theater and video presentations, commercials, photo editorials, stop motion and puppet presentations, and architectural installations. He's currently focusing on Production Design and Art Direction for film and TV.  His work has been seen on Showtime, Amazon, PBS, Cartoon Network, on Disney Digital Media, in the pages of Playboy, on HBO, on stages from New York to Chicago to Branson, Missouri, and in film festivals across the country. Snodgrass did the multimedia design for The Crossing’s 2016 project Seven Responses, featuring new works by David T. Little, Hans Thomalla, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, and Santa Ratniece. Learn more at www.brettsnodgrass.com. 

About Steven Bradshaw
A graduate of The University of the Arts, Steven Bradshaw is a professional vocalist and visual artist based in Philadelphia. He has appeared as a soloist with The Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra, Tempesta Di Mare, Bang on a Can, The Bach Collegium of Philadelphia, and Network for New Music. In March 2020 he was scheduled to perform as a soloist with the LA Phil for the premiere of Pulitzer finalist Ted Hearne’s PLACE, reprising the role first performed at the BAM Next Wave Festival. He is a founding member of The Crossing. 

In addition to recording and performing all over the country with Variant 6, Roomful of Teeth, and Ekmeles, Steven performs regularly with Seraphic Fire, Trinity Wall Street, Spire, Blue Heron, Yale Choral Artists, and Apollo’s Fire. Steven premiered Pulitzer Prize winner David Lang’s work lifespan for three whistlers and a four billion year-old fossil, and gave over 300 performances of the work. 

In addition to his singing career, Steven is a dedicated visual artist. He has designed album artwork for two Crossing Albums: CARTHAGE (Navona, May 2020) and the GRAMMY Award-winning Zealot Canticles (Innova, September 2018) and concept artwork for Gavin Bryars’ A Native Hill and Greg Spears’ The Tower and the Garden. His artwork has been featured at Arch Enemy Arts, Stephen Romano Gallery, Gristle Gallery (NYC), Philamoca (Philadelphia), Baker-Hezeldenz (Tucson AZ) , and La Luz De Jesus gallery in Los Angeles California. Learn more at www.stevenbradshawart.com.

About Paul Vazquez
Paul Vazquez is a veteran of location recording and routinely records for artists across wide ranging genres. In 2003, Paul created Digital Mission Audio Services in order to provide the unique audio needs of multiple genres throughout the NYC area and beyond. Paul is the sound designer for The Crossing. Paul’s work can be heard on WRTI concert broadcasts of The Crossing, as well as many of their notable CD releases including GRAMMY Award-winners The Fifth Century and Zealot Canticles, and GRAMMY-nominated Bonhoeffer.

In addition to his work with The Crossing, Paul has provided on site recording and post production for local and national touring acts including Lovely the Band, Matt Mason, CHVRCHES, Ingrid Michaelson, Sarah Barailles, Marian Hill, Mumford and Sons and more. He has worked with labels such as Sony, Glassnote, Windup and more, and at venues from NYC to D.C., including Bowery Ballroom, Le Poisson Rouge, Mercury Lounge, Highline Ballroom, Music Hall of Williamsburg, National Cathedral, 9:30 Club and more. Paul holds a B.S. in Music Education from West Chester University.

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