Music of America V: OATH BREAKER

On April 20, 2024 at 7:30 pm, the newly reinvented Cleveland Chamber Collective takes the stage at Disciples Christian Church in Cleveland Heights, for their inaugural concert. The new lineup combines some faces familiar to the Cleveland chamber music scene, including violinist Emily Cornelius, flutist Linda White, and pianist Eric Charnofsky. Also joining the band are up and coming performers, violist Brian Slawta, and cellist Trevor Kazarian, with returning members, percussionist Dylan Moffitt and composer/director Ty Alan Emerson, rounding out the cast.

Those familiar with the band know them for their eclectic programming and excellence in performance. This concert should prove no different as the Collective, with its new stable of top-notch players, premieres Emerson’s OATH BREAKER.

OATH BREAKER takes the audience on a 60-minute journey of anger, grief, and hope, while striving to come to grips with the events of January 6 and the subsequent fallout. Composer Ty Alan Emerson is clear that this is not a replaying of events or an underscoring of the various videos played at hearings. Rather, he refers to the work as a Requiem in form and presentation, stating that his hope for the piece is an “emotional and spiritual process, like a mass or similar spiritual sequence.”

The work features the full ensemble and electronic playback. The digital elements consist of musical sounds as well as text. Instead of the traditional Latin liturgy, Emerson uses quotes by Shakespeare, Lincoln, Cervantes, Elizabeth I and others, as well as testimony, texts and tweets, to conjure the images and emotions from that terrible day.

Each member of the ensemble shines with solos, some raucous and visceral, others pleading and poignant. The work lends many places for the ensemble to display its tutti playing, including lengthy unison passagework punctuated by bass drum, in the work’s Dies Irae.

The Collective’s concert is scheduled to be recorded live and live-streamed through the band’s Facebook page. A second performance is scheduled for Sunday, April 28, at 3:30 PM at Inlet Dance Theater’s studio, the Estuary. Inlet’s studio is located at the Pivot Center for Art, Dance and Expression, 2937 West 25th St, Cleveland.