Global Warming by Michael Abels
Performed Sunday, May 7th, 2023 | First Christian Church
Conductor: Thomas Wilson
Audio/Video: Michael Lascuola
Program Notes: Jennifer Carpenter
Contemporary composer Michael Abels has made his mark as both a composer of film scores and concert pieces. His film scores for the Jordan Peele films GET OUT, US, and NOPE have won numerous recognitions and awards, with both US and NOPE being nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Score.
His concert works are also receiving critical acclaim. The New York Times named OMAR, an opera co-composed with Grammy-winning recording artist Rhiannon Giddens, one of the 10 best classical performances of 2022: “What Giddens and Abels created is an ideal of American sound, an inheritor of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess but more honest to its subject matter, conjuring folk music, spirituals, Islamic prayer, and more, woven together with a compelling true story that transcends documentary.”
Abels’ genre-defying compositions began during his teen years – by the age of 13, he had his first completed orchestral work performed. Since then, The New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the National Symphony, and many others have performed Abels’ concert works. He is also the co-founder of the Composers Diversity Collective, an advocacy group to increase visibility of composers of color in film, gaming, and streaming media.
With a “keen ear for musical color and a deft ability to adapt structural elements from popular music into the symphonic idiom,” (Houston Chronicle), Abels gained widespread recognition for his orchestral piece Global Warming. Abels states:
GLOBAL WARMING is an orchestral work that uses the term to describe the warming of international relations that was happening in the world at that time. The Berlin Wall had just come down, the Cold War was declared over. “I wanted to write a piece that explored the similarities I heard between music of various cultures,” Abels said. “It begins with a desert scene, a depiction of a futuristic vast desert, with desert locusts buzzing in the background. But soon the piece turns quite uplifting. There are elements of Irish music, African music, Persian rhythms, drones, blended to display their commonalities in a way that is often quite joyous. But rather than end happily, the piece suddenly returns to its original, stark, desert scene, leaving it to the listener to decide which version of global warming they prefer. At the time of its premiere, global warming was not the politically charged term it is today. The piece was not written as a political statement, but its political message has inevitably deepened as climate change has evolved from theory into reality.
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