About the Weekend:

Thanks to a new mobilized technological innovation called E.C.H.O.E.S. (Ex Covid Haptotropic Optimistic Electrophonic Sound), The Crossing, the Grammy-winning vocal group from Philadelphia, will be going outside this summer. In partnership with the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center, Jack Creek Preserve Foundation, and Cache Creek Outfitters, audiences will experience The Crossing like never before. 

HOW IT WORKS: Patrons purchase just one ticket per vehicle, and can fit as many people as they like into each vehicle. Like entering Yellowstone National Park.

Evening 1: The Forest

Friday, July 30th with staggered entrances anytime between 7-8pm @ Jack Creek Preserve
Limited Tickets Available

The Forest is an immersive, 30-minute hiking experience in which listeners walk through a performance, in a forest at Jack Creek Preserve. Hikers/listeners move through the piece as quickly or slowly as they wish, and will encounter singers along the way as they explore the environment. Speakers are positioned close to the designated path, reestablishing those currently-broken relationships between singers and audience members, and telling our story – the story of a planet in crisis, its people and its forests in peril, and yet, in that curiously human way, a story of hope and a way forward.  

The text and music of The Forest focus on the symbiotic relationship between individual trees and the forest – a metaphor for the relationship between each singer and a full ensemble. The libretto is formed of singers’ reflection on their isolation during COVID-Time, overlaid with texts from Scott Russell Sanders’ essay “Mind in the Forest.” The music is composed by Kevin Vondrak and Donald Nally.

DIRECTIONS TO JACK CREEK:
From Big Sky to the Jack Creek Preserve
• Head West on Lone Mountain Trail (Highway 64) towards Big Sky Resort.
• Continue on Highway 64. Go through the Moonlight Entryway and turn right at the roundabout onto MOUNTAIN
LOOP TRAIL.
• Go .5 mile, and turn right onto JACK CREEK ROAD (third right, across from Ulery’s Lake Camp). There is also a
small pond on the right once you turn onto the road.
• The gate is approximately 2 miles further on Jack Creek Rd and you will need a gate code.
• After passing through the gate, continue to follow the Jack Creek Road approximately 8.5-.75 miles. You will
cross a cattle guard just after mile marker 7 and enter the Preserve property.
• The entrance to the Outdoor Education Center is on the left and marked with a large sign (between mile marker
8 and 9).

Evening 2: in nature / i feel

Saturday, July 31st @ 7pm at Cache Creek Outfitters off the Moose Creek Forest Service Road
Limited Tickets Available

The final event of The Crossing’s 2021 residency features a glorious concert of three new pieces up in a high alpine meadow on top of the Gallatin Canyon at Cache Creek Outfitters, a 15 minute drive up the Moose Creek forest service road off of Highway 191 between Big Sky and Gallatin Gateway. Event goers will park at Cache Creek Outfitters, and then walk for 10-15 minutes along an old logging road to the mountain meadow concert. The featured pieces for the evening are David Lang’s in nature, which was commissioned by The Crossing and the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in August of 2020 and will now be performed actually in nature; a new choral arrangement of the iconic Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, by Gavin Bryars; and Ayanna Woods’ shift, a contemporary piece that reflects on monuments.

DIRECTIONS TO CACHE CREEK OUTFITTERS:
From Big Sky, MT, take HWY 191 North as if you are heading to Bozeman (about 8 miles). Look for signage stating Moose Creek Road #479 and Moose Creek Flats. Moose Creek Road is on the right side heading from Big Sky, the left side coming from Bozeman. Drive 2.5 miles up a dirt road, follow signage, and take a left at the signage to come into the ranch. Follow the signage, and park on the side of the road once you make it up to the small screened in building with outhouses, and an attendant will help set you on the trail to the outdoor concert.

ABOUT THE CREATORS

The Crossing is a professional chamber choir, conducted by Donald Nally, that is dedicated to new music. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works that explore and expand ways of writing for choir, singing in choir, and listening to music for choir. 

Many of its nearly 110 commissioned premieres address social, environmental, and political issues. With a commitment to recording its commissions, The Crossing has issued 24 releases. They have earned two Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance (2018, 2019), and six Grammy nominations. The Crossing, with Donald Nally, was the American Composers Forum’s 2017 Champion of New Music. They were the recipients of the 2015 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence, three ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, and the Dale Warland Singers Commission Award from Chorus America.

Ayanna Woods is a composer, performer, and bandleader from Chicago. Her music explores the spaces between acoustic and electronic, traditional and esoteric, wildly improvisational and mathematically rigorous. A collaborator across genres and forms, her work spans new music, theater, film scoring, arranging, songwriting, and improvisation. She earned her B.A. in music from Yale University.

Woods has collaborated on projects with Chanticleer, The Crossing, Third Coast Percussion, Manual Cinema, the Chicago Children’s Choir, Chance the Rapper, and her sister Jamila Woods, among others. In 2018, she originated her role as a vocalist in Place, an oratorio about gentrification and displacement co-conceived by Pulitzer Prize finalist Ted Hearne, director Patricia McGregor, and poet/librettist Saul Williams. The album version of Place received two Grammy nominations. Woods is also a sought-after bassist and improvisor in Chicago. As the bassist for the group TASHA, she toured the west coast and performed at Pitchfork Music Festival in 2019.

Gavin Bryars is an English composer and double bassist. He has been active in (or has produced works in) many varied styles of music, including jazz, free improvisation, minimalist experimental music, avant-garde, neoclassicism, and ambient. Bryars’s first works as a composer owe much to the so-called New York School of John Cage (with whom he briefly studied), Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and minimalism. His early work includes Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971), which has at its basis a recorded loop of a tramp improvising a hymn of that name. On top of that loop, rich harmonies played by a live ensemble are built, always increasing in density, before the whole thing gradually fades out. A new recording of this work was made in the 1990s with Tom Waits singing along with the original recording of the tramp during the final section. Bryars has written a large number of other works, including three operas, and a number of instrumental pieces, among them three string quartets and several concertos. He has written several pieces for choreographers, including Biped (2001) for Merce Cunningham.

David Lang is one of America’s most performed composers. Many of his works resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalogue is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling and very emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music — even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike. Lang’s works are performed around the globe by the BBC Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, eighth blackbird, Santa Fe Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the Netherlands Chamber Choir, the Boston Symphony, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, the Kronos Quartet and many others; and at festivals and venues such as Lincoln Center, the Southbank Centre, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Barbican Centre, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Tanglewood, the BBC Proms, MusicNOW festival, The Munich Biennale, the Settembre Musica Festival, the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival and the Almeida, Holland, Berlin, Adelaide and Strasbourg Festivals.

Lang is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, Musical America’s Composer of the Year, Carnegie Hall’s Debs Composer’s Chair, the Rome Prize, the BMW Music-Theater Prize (Munich), and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.