Feb. 2: Seattle Symphony Presents Steven Mackey’s Theatrical Musical 'Memoir'

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
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 The Seattle Symphony Presents Steven Mackey’s Memoir 
Friday February 2, 2024 (7pm and 9:30pm) at Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center

A Theatrical Musical Adaptation of his Mother’s Memoir, the Tale of a
First-Generation American Woman in Search of the American Dream

“Mackey’s sonic imagination is coupled with a deep mastery of craft” – The Boston Globe

"strikingly immersive music" – Musical America

www.stevenmackey.com

Seattle, WA (January 9, 2024) – On Friday, February 2, 2024 at 7:00pm and 9:30pm, the Seattle Symphony presents GRAMMY Award-winning composer Steven Mackey’s theatrical musical work, Memoir, at Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center - Benaroya Hall. Featuring the dynamic percussionists of arx duo and a string quartet composed of Seattle Symphony musicians, the program is directed by Mark DeChiazza and narrated by Natalie Christa. Now based in New Jersey, Mackey went to high school at Clover Park High School in Tacoma, and frequently traveled to Seattle to see artists such as Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and others.

Memoir explores the tumultuous 20th century as told through the eyes of a first-generation American woman (Elaine Mackey, Steven’s mother) charting her own path in search of the American Dream. In his program note, Mackey shares, “Memoir is an adaptation of my own mother’s memoir which gives the process and the product a heightened personal connection. The script is a series of short vignettes which trace Elaine Mackey’s life as a first-generation American, born in Steel Town USA, coming of age in the Great Depression, escaping an ill-fated Hollywood marriage to work for the Department of Defense in post-war Europe and raising a family in Northern California in the volatile 60’s. Against the backdrop of the events of the 20th century, a la Forrest Gump, there is a touching candor and vulnerability to my mom’s stories revealing the tension between her shy nature and her longing for adventure; her “nice-girl” upbringing and her openness to experience. Familiar themes of love, loss, gender roles, and social mores ensconced in her intense personal struggle with alcoholism and its stigma.”

In the 75-minute musical work, Elaine’s journey is told through music and narrated vignettes from her own memoir and that of her son, the composer. Mackey added, “Memoir more directly references her favorite music and the lullaby medley she sang to me as a child. Overall, the musical language of Memoir is a bit simpler and more direct than I would do if I were writing a piece without connection to this text. Her voice, ringing through these stories, asked for something more innocent.”

Written for string quartet, percussion duo and narrator, the visually and sonically captivating work spans diverse musical landscapes and characters, from witty and playful to rich and profound. He further added, “There are plenty of opportunities to employ the grave expressivity idiomatic to the string quartet as well as the playful spirit, wit and irony made possible by the surprising variety of sounds available to a percussion duo. The string quartet has a particular knack for warm, emotional and profound musical expression and the diverse, often surprising timbral possibilities of the percussion duo brings witt, irony, and a playful spirit to the stage. Rich and complex experiences result from the multivalent combinations of the two elements. Many of my mother’s stories ask me to combine two contrasting musical characters in order to spark a fresh, more particular musical alchemy.” Memoir saw its world premiere in 2022 at the Waltons Arts Center in a spectacular performance by the Dover Quartet.

Program Information
Seattle Symphony Presents Steven Mackey’s Memoir
Friday, February 2, 2024 at 7:00pm and 9:30pm
Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center - Benaroya Hall | Seattle, WA
Tickets: $40
Link: www.seattlesymphony.org/en/concerttickets/calendar/2023-2024/23octave3
 
About Steven Mackey
“My entire life was changed by a single note.” As a teenager growing up in Northern California obsessed with blues-rock guitar, Steven Mackey was in search of the “right wrong notes,” as he often likes to say, referencing Thelonius Monk. The single note in question occurs in the second movement of Beethoven’s last string quartet, which a 19-year-old Mackey heard while driving around northern California: an unexpected unison E-flat that wielded the power to explode assumptions he had about classical music. He would later describe it as the most psychedelic rock music he’d ever heard.

Mackey cites this as the moment he decided to become a composer, and it set the young guitarist on a path that has defined his music to this day: Colorful notes (including blue) creating vivid topographies that serve as landmarks on fantastical journeys.

Today, Steven Mackey is a GRAMMY-winning composer of works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance, and opera—commissioned by the greatest orchestras around the world, and winner of several awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. Bright in coloring, ecstatic in inventiveness, lively and profound, Mackey’s music spins the tendrils of his improvisatory riffs into large-scale works of grooving, dramatic coherence.

Mackey began composition studies at the University of California at Davis and received his PhD at Brandeis University. Upon graduating and becoming a professor at Princeton, Mackey came to realize his true creative voice by merging his academic training with the free-spirited physicality of his mother-tongue rock guitar music. Signature pieces incorporating rock vernacular into traditional classical ensembles emerged: Troubadour Songs (1991) for string quartet and electric guitar; Physical Property (1992) for electric guitar and string quartet; and Banana/Dump Truck (1995), a concerto for solo electrified cello plus a ripieno group of cellists and orchestra.

The decades that followed saw Mackey create many of the defining pieces in his repertoire: Dreamhouse (2003) for solo tenor, vocal quartet, electric guitar quartet and orchestra, nominated for four GRAMMY awards; A Beautiful Passing (2008) for violin and orchestra, an emotional reflection upon the death of his mother that Leila Josefowicz premiered with the BBC Philharmonic; and Slide (2011), an experimental music theater piece that won a GRAMMY Award for a recording featuring Mackey on electric guitar alongside vocalist Rinde Eckert and eighth blackbird. In 2021, the LA Phil, Gustavo Dudamel, and trumpet soloist Thomas Hooten gave the world premiere of Shivaree, a fantasy for trumpet and orchestra. Mackey further expanded his theatrical catalog with his short chamber opera Moon Tea about the 1969 meeting between the Apollo 11 astronauts and the Royal Family, premiered by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2021, as well as with his 2022 music theater work Memoir, based on the pages of his late mother’s memoirs and 2022 Concerto for Curved Space, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons. Red Wood, a new environmentally concerned work, was premiered as part of The Soraya’s Treelogy Project and Mackey’s RIOT was premiered by mezzo-soprano Alicia Olatuja, Mackey on electric guitar, New Jersey Symphony, Princeton University Glee Club, and conductor Xian Zhang.

Mackey’s music is published by Boosey & Hawkes. Today, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, and their son Jasper and daughter Dylan, and teaches at Princeton University, where he mentors young composers as director of the Edward T. Cone Composition Institute. In fall 2022, Mackey also joined the composition faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music. He continues to explore an ever-widening world of timbres befitting a complex, 21st-century culture, while always striving to make music that unites the head and heart, that is visceral, that gets us moving. Learn more at www.stevenmackey.com.

Photo Credit: Kah Poon

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