Composer Jessica Meyer Doubles As Soloist In Premiere Of Viola Concerto, GAEA

Award-winning composer and violist Jessica Meyer will be the featured soloist in the world premiere of her own new work GAEA: Concerto for Amplified Viola and Chamber Orchestra. She'll perform alongside the Orchestra of the League of Composers - which commissioned the work - on Thursday, May 25, 2023 at 8:00pm at Columbia University's Miller Theatre in New York. Louis Karchin, Music Director of the Orchestra of the League of Composers, will conduct.

Praised for her "fierce-edged playing" (The New Yorker) and "other-worldly" compositions (The Strad), Meyer describes how this work was conceived around the Gaea of Greek mythology, the primordial goddess of the Earth. "When I started writing for myself and loop pedal after years of performing acoustic contemporary music, I discovered an entire vocabulary of fragile colors and expressive sounds simply because I was amplified," she says. "This concerto for amplified viola marries the wealth of colors and gestures spectral composers have developed throughout the 20th century, while also incorporating the virtuosity of baroque string playing, to tell the story of Gaea."

According to Hesiod's version of Greek Mythology, Gaea was the goddess of the Earth and one of the primordial deities born at the dawn of creation (Chaos). All the heavenly gods were descended from her through her union with Uranus, but he was so jealous of his offspring (the Titans, the Cyclops, and the Hecatoncheires) that he kept shoving them back into Gaea's womb. In great pain, she asks her children for help, and Cronus comes to her aid to maim his father. Uranus' blood falls into the sea, and the goddess Aphrodite is born from the foam over the water where it fell. She rises from the waves on her shell and sails to the shore of the island of Cythera, introduced to the world with great fanfare.

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