About the Project
The story of classical music is the story of a family tree hundreds of years old. It’s the story of artists reckoning with their past while attempting to push the field and culture forward. It’s the story of vital tradition going through a deeply public existential crisis. It’s the story of a field clumsily reckoning with its own imperfections while trying to preserve the art form that allows for the creation of some of humanity’s most sublime and essential artistic statements. It’s the story of a field whose cultural relevance–strictly in terms of reach and impact–is low enough to threaten the survival of some of its most storied institutions. And it’s the story of a field whose most vital and beautiful works haven’t been written yet, a field whose best days are ahead of it.
Legacies is a multigenerational song cycle project created by The Living Earth Show with the Sleeping Giant Composers Collective designed to interrogate the responsibility we have to steward our own history, and how we fit into an organism much larger than one individual.
The six members of the collective Sleeping Giant – Timo Andres, Christopher Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Andrew Norman, and Robert Honstein – are some of the most performed and commissioned living composers of their generation. These composers have accrued a bevy of professional accolades, including six Pulitzer Prizes nominations, several Grammy awards and a few Rome Prizes, but suffice to say: the story of classical music in this millennium would simply be incomplete without them.
As has been the tradition in our field for centuries, the composers continue the lineage they inherited from their teachers by building their own thriving composition studios at some of the most influential music schools in the United States.
In Legacies, each Sleeping Giant composer will write an art song for The Living Earth Show and vocalist Tanner Porter (scored for guitar, percussion, and vocals) loosely based around their own conception of legacy: where they come from, what they would tell their younger self, and where they fit into an organism so much larger than any one individual.
Crucially, each Sleeping Giant composer selected one of their former students to join them in writing a song for the project with the same prompt. These six vital emerging voices–Akshaya Tucker (a former student of Robert Honstein), Anuj Bhutani (who studied with Andrew Norman), Christina George (who studied with Jacob Cooper), Rohan Chander (who studied with Ted Hearne), Nathaniel Parks (who studied with Christopher Cerrone), and Danny Castellanos (who studied with Timo Andres)--will join their former teachers in writing songs for the cycle.
These twelve songs, then, represent our best attempt to reckon with our own responsibility to steward our tradition. In the process, we strive to allow audiences to see and hear, in real time, how musical communities grow and how the lineage of our classical music tradition unfolds.
Built over two years in partnerships with the University of Texas at Austin, West Chester University, Mannes School of Music, and a variety of other institutions across the United States, Legacies activates musical communities spanning generations, geography, musical training, and background to tell the story of who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going.
About the Artists
Sleeping Giant
A collective of six young American composers (Timo Andres, Christopher Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Robert Honstein, and Andrew Norman). These “talented guys” (The New Yorker), who are “rapidly gaining notice for their daring innovations, stylistic range and acute attention to instrumental nuance” (WQXR) have composed a diverse body of music that prizes vitality and diversity over a rigid aesthetic.
For more information click the images below.
The Living Earth Show
Deemed “outstanding” (San Francisco Chronicle), “transcendent” (Charleston City Paper) and one of the “22 for ‘22 performers to watch,” (Washington Post), The Living Earth Show – guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson – represents the future of American contemporary and experimental chamber music. For more information click here.
Tanner Porter
Tanner Porter is a composer-performer and songwriter. In her “original art songs that are by turns seductive and confessional” (Steve Smith, The New Yorker), Tanner explores her passion for storytelling, often framing her work within the imagery of the California coast she grew up on. Tanner’s orchestral music, described as “drop-dead gorgeous” (Jim Munson, Broadway World), has been commissioned by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, the New York Youth Symphony and Nu Deco Ensemble, among others.
Timeline
In 2024, the Sleeping Giant composers will each select a current or former student to round out the roster and begin the writing process of their scores.
In 2025, the scores will be workshopped and finalized over the course of six development periods. The trio of musicians will work with each pair–the Sleeping Giant composer and the composer that that member chooses–over the course of a week in development residencies. Over the course of that week, the artists will engage in a series of lectures and workshops with percussionists, guitarists, vocalists, chamber musicians, and composers, culminating in a free development performance of the works, followed by an audience discussion about the work and where it came from with the composers and musicians.
In 2026, the works will also be recorded and released as a full-length album on The Living Earth Show’s in-house Earthy Records label, allowing the works to be streamable and accessible for free to anyone with an internet connection.
Legacies will be the culmination of The Living Earth Show’s 15th anniversary season in 2026. And, hopefully, we’ll replicate this project again 15 years after that, with the six now-student composers then selecting six students of their own.
With a series of planned engagements in the project’s lifetime, with built-in curriculum and activation from academic communities, and with an album that will live on in perpetuity, the project is a means of creating its own legacy.