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MUSIC

Here’s one convenient place to listen to all of the incredible original music Satellite Collective has composed for its shows.

Satellite Collective’s Original Music Organized by Show

Composers and musicians from both coasts advance classical music with soundscapes and new rhythms. The Satellite Ensemble grows and changes under new music direction each year, with musicians from all over the country performing and recording original music in collaboration with poets, artists, choreographers and architects.

Emergence

Original live music from Brooklyn Academy of Music performance, May, 2014. The unsettling of Spring grounds inspired this piece. Cycles of growth, searching, pain, and tenderness

Composed by Nick Jaina. Amanda Lawrence, Viola / Nick Jaina, Piano and Production
From chaos arises tenderness and vulnerability. A passionate search, lashed by pain, leads to insight, hope, resilience.
A haunting meditation on inevitability.
Inescapable murmuring chatter plays against a tribal thrum.
Conviction becomes trepidation, but eventually alights on tenuous tenderness, exposed and unprotected.

Rituals

A dance for six, with multimedia. “Ritual” dives into the volcanic beginnings of families.

Composed by Nick Jaina. Amanda Lawrence, Viola / Nick Jaina, Piano and Production
Whispers of steam, rising scraping strings, typewriter-like percussion, humming whirs, static, rising heat, insistent disorientation.
Bouncing, strident strings and descending piano.
Warming drill of strings, easing into mournfulness, tendrils of hope subsumed by grief, breathed deeply.
Driving, rumbling drums, piano and strings, running through the forest and fields, joyful and vibrant.
Thrumming corridor of sound, invading sharp breaths, piano explores the landscape.
Simmering heat, thermal pockets rocketing, can it sustain life?
Tapping and clicking, rapid tinkling bells, contrapuntal strings.

 

Cosmonaut

Original live music from Baryshnikov Arts Center performance, September 2012

Composed by Nick Jaina, Nathan Langston and Amanda Lawrence. Kevin Draper, LIbretto / Nick Jaina, Lyrics / Kaylee Cole, Vocals
Music box trepidation. Under a vast, starry night, a twirling dance. Sudden chaos, soothed by strings. A stranger whistles through a dark tunnel. Wanderers, lonely and enterprising, walk at night. Light flickers fast, flickers out.

Time and Again

Original music from the Satellite Collective 2015 Summer Residency, September, 2014

Composed by Richie Greene. Catherine Hancock, Soprano / Mitchell Falconer, Piano / Richie Greene, Violin and Production
Dreamlike piano and interrupting operatic voices. Rising wind and rain.
Tentative, skipping piano. Deep strings ground down, then rise. A reaching out, a lengthening, a hopeful extension. A terse engine moving forward, lightening, becoming tender.
Weaving piano and strings. Electric, bouncing waves, vibrating.
A gentle dance with chanting voices. The dance becomes subtly disoriented, as if on a slanted floor.
Intense layers of texture and voice. An anxious, invading chant.

Twin Star Event

A short film that tells the story of Apollo and the birth of his sister. Scored to an experimental quintet by Ellis Ludwig-Leone.

Composed by Ellis Ludwig-Leone

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Blurred, smeared, burning strings, playful and menacing. They are beaten, plucked, ripped, stretched, swollen, and breathing.

Edie Leaves Twice

Edie Leaves Twice is the second in the Satellite Collective series of short films — the story of a young woman leaving her home twice — once as she leaves her mother, and again when she must return to get her child.

Composed by Ellis Ludwig-Leone

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Tender and filled with longing, anxiety, and tension. Feeling uncertainty and doubt, bound by familial ties. Coming apart, unprotected. Risking everything for a sense of safety and home.

 

Epistasis

Original Music for the Ballet, “Epistasis”

Composed and Performed by Nick Jaina, Nathan Langston and Amanda Lawrence.
Piano flashes brightly, strings pluck playfully. Tiny wings fluttering, a romantic swell.
Piano rumbles, insistently building.
Throaty bowed strings gain speed.
Cold, tinkling piano and racing strings.
The strings evoke lines drawn, curving from a pen; a letter, a sketch.
Isolation, uncertainly, wistfulness.
Bending notes leaning into a lilt.
Building steam, ready to begin. Perhaps he hammers nails, sands and polishes lovingly. He adds ornate details with enthusiasm, inspiration.
Piano prelude tapping tentatively, snapping back, becoming playful. A courtship, a fiery romance, an enduring love, a source of joy.

Progress

Original Music for the Ballet, “Progress”

Composed and Performed by Nick Jaina, Nathan Langston and Amanda Lawrence.
Into the curious depths, determined and with wary longing…discoveries bloom.
Tick, tick, tick, a building anticipation and excitement.
Anxiety trots along, a playful disorientation.
Filthy, scraping strings, followed by a hopeful call. An interplay of demoralization and fresh opportunity.
Fresh, bright and bold opening. Lush, leisurely, and genteel.
A wistful remembrance, longing remains.
A perfumed and gracious environment, welcoming and vast, alive with movement.

 

Thief

Original Music for the Ballet, “Thief”: A thief of memories considers his love for a woman, how he might be helpful to her, and how he might convince her to trade her future for the wonderful past he has collected behind her.

Composed by Nick Jaina. Kevin Draper, Libretto / Nick Jaina, Lyrics
Spilling, cascading notes. The trickster lays the groundwork, surveys the landscape, and makes his plan.
A trotting pace, a sense of excitement. A shift into a more somber mode. Pain and regret trudging forward. Fear and trepidation. Finally, a sense of acceptance of a painful reality.
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