Sing Democracy 250 at Lincoln Center
David Geffen Hall gives me room to move. I can work the upper balcony, drop to the main floor, position near the choir loft, switch levels between pieces. With a choir this size, that mobility is the whole job, because the wide mass and the single face are different photographs and you can't get both from one spot.
The Together In Hope Project brought three ensembles together for this: the Together In Hope Choir, the Mizzou University Singers, and the Stuyvesant High School Oratorio Choir, all in black with matching scarves, backed by the Main Line Symphony Orchestra under G. Phillip Shoultz III. The risers were full and the choir spilled into the balcony. From the upper level it reads as one mass, one instrument, and that's the frame an organization needs, three ensembles and a full orchestra in a hall at Lincoln Center for a program built around the 250th anniversary of American independence. Pull back far enough and you also get the room itself in the picture, the conductor's back, the projections on both walls, the audience in silhouette below.
But a count of voices isn't a story. Move in close from the balcony and the mass breaks back into people. Same scarves, different generations, faces caught at different points in the same phrase. The folders in those rows read "Redeem the Dream," Brandon A. Boyd's commissioned piece, which sets Langston Hughes's "Let America Be America Again" against text from the Declaration of Independence, one of two world premieres on the night alongside Michael Bussewitz-Quarm's "US."
Between the wide and the tight sits a third register, a soloist or the conductor where you can still read the relationship to everyone around them. Jermaine Manor at the microphone with Shoultz and the orchestra arranged around him is that middle distance, the moment legible without losing the room.
The Together In Hope Project commissioned the music, produced the event, and brought the ensembles to this stage, and that's the kind of work that lives in front of funders and audiences long after the night itself, so it needs to read at every scale at once. If you're putting this many bodies on a stage, the freedom to move is most of how the coverage holds together. I'd be glad to talk through what that looks like for your hall. Reach out here.
