Los Angeles, CA

LA Phil – Gen X Festival

Alarm Will Sound presents Alyssa Pyper’s Cradle and Andrew Hamilton’s Music for people who like art at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Join AWS in BP Hall for a concert curated by Thomas Adès. The performance will follow the LA Philharmonic’s presentation of music by Jonathan Bailey Holland, Andrew Norman, and John Corigliano.

About Cradle:

Alyssa Pyper created Cradle as part of a symbolic journey into the trauma of growing up queer, classically trained, and Mormon. Cradle is a calling toward acknowledgement of ancestral and cultural trauma, toward a reclamation of what has been lost. Cradle’s calling reckons with a personal and cultural “mother wound,” as informed by Pyper’s experience in the Mormon faith – indeed the ways in which the Mormon church cannot, will not hold its LGBTQ+ members. In equal part, the composition of the piece emerged through the composer’s dissonance with not only fundamentalist religion, but a pedagogy of classical violin dispersed through the frame of a perfectionist religious culture.

The arc of the work speaks to wounding and loss, with a subsequent search for mothering through human-others who are also wounded or lost. Cradle moves through places of fracture, betrayal, rage, and grief, into a final somber prayer, where no new thing can be known yet.
Cradle’s offering is the artist’s call to be seen, and subsequently the burden the artist must undertake in response to this selfsame call to be “seen.”

At its earliest emergence, Pyper performed Cradle alone using a loop pedal with her violin and voice, pushing the pedal to the edges of its frame by embracing aleatoric elements in live performance. When Alarm Will Sound made a call in late 2018 for classically influenced music of the fringes, music that could embrace “mistake” as part of process, Pyper knew Cradle could grow and further define itself through a collaboration with the ensemble. Through a close mentorship, members of Alarm Will Sound co-created with Pyper a version of Cradle that allows for members of an ensemble to tap into its arc and participate in its call.