Please join the Western Symphony Orchestra for its first performance of the 2024-25 season in an exploration of the concept of indigenousness—or belonging to a place. The program opens with the Mohican composter Brent Michael Davids’s Indigenous/Undigenous II, written in tribute to the Lenape people of the eastern United States and featuring spoken lines of text in their native language.
The WSO is then joined by the acclaimed Western Concert Choir for the stunningly beautiful Serenade to Music by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Here Vaughan Williams, perhaps the most British of British composers, sets excerpts from Shakespeare, arguably the most foundational of British writers.
Closing the program is the monumental Fourth Symphony of William Grant Still. Nicknamed the “Autochthonous” (the Greek equivalent of “indigenous”) by its composer, the symphony weaves together a plurality of American musical styles into a cohesive tapestry that could only have originated from this cultural soil.
