Buy TicketsThis summer, The Crossing establishes even deeper roots in its second home: Big Sky, Montana. We’re bringing the entire ensemble and doing what we do best, inspiring new work from one of the country’s most recognized composers, Michael Gordon. Our work in Montana will be about Montana – land, space, sky, water – with a concert-length film by acclaimed filmmaker Bill Morrison, wedded in its creation to Michael’s new work. We will continue the tradition of our Community Sing, a popular Saturday morning event during which The Crossing and singers from the Big Sky area share ideas, talent, and a love for community music making. And, we’ll make our Bozeman debut at Reynolds Hall at Montana State, collaborating with Montana’s own professional choir, Aoide.
Come. Mountain. Now.
THE CHOIR AND HISTORY
The Crossing is a professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for choir – most often addressing social issues – with the possibility of changing the way we think about writing for choir, singing in choir, and listening to music for choir.
Winners of the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance, The Crossing, with Donald Nally, was the American Composers Forums’ 2017 Champion of New Music. The Crossing’s 2014 commission Sound From The Bench by Ted Hearne was named a 2018 Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. They are the recipient of the 2015 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence, three ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, as well as the Dale Warland Singers Commission Award (with composer Joel Puckett) from Chorus America. Donald Nally was awarded the 2017 Michael Korn Award and the 2012 Louis Botto Award for Innovative Action and Entrepreneurial Zeal for his work with The Crossing. The Crossing has been named in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Top Classical Events of the Season numerous times.
Highly sought-after for collaborative projects, The Crossing’s first collaboration was as the resident choir of the Spoleto Festival, Italy, in 2007. Collaborations are now an important aspect of their work; The Crossing has appeared at Miller Theatre of Columbia University in the American premiere of James Dillon’s Nine Rivers with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE); joined Bang on a Can’s first Philadelphia Marathon; and has sung with the American Composers Orchestra, Network for New Music, Lyric Fest, Piffaro, Tempesta di Mare Baroque Chamber Orchestra, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, Toshimaru Nakamura, Beth Morrison Projects, Dolce Suono, Allora & Calzadilla, Pig Iron Theatre Company and The Rolling Stones.
The Crossing has sung at Walt Disney Concert Hall, The Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, National Sawdust, the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston, The Barnes Foundation, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Northwestern University. In 2014 they premiered John Luther Adams’ Sila: the breath of the world at Lincoln Center in a collaboration with the Mostly Mozart Festival, Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, eighth blackbird, Jack Quartet, and TILT brass and returned to Mostly Mozart with the International Contemporary Ensemble for Seven Responses in 2016. The Crossing holds an annual residency at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Montana.
Upcoming collaborations include the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Park Avenue Armory, Peak Performances, Annenberg Center Live, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Duke University, Notre Dame University, and Helsinki’s Klockriketeatern.
DONALD NALLY, CONDUCTOR
Donald Nally is responsible for imagining, programming, commissioning, and conducting at The Crossing. He is also the director of choral organizations at Northwestern University where he holds the John W. Beattie Chair of Music. Donald has served as chorus master at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Welsh National Opera, Opera Philadelphia, and for many seasons at the Spoleto Festival in Italy. He has also served as music director of Cincinnati’s Vocal Arts Ensemble, chorus master at The Chicago Bach Project, and guest conductor throughout Europe and the United States, most notably with the Grant Park Symphony Chorus, the Philharmonia Chorus (London), the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, and the Latvian State Choir (Riga).
Donald, with The Crossing, was the American Composers Forum 2017 Champion of New Music; he received the 2017 Michael Korn Founders Award from Chorus America. He is the only conductor to have two ensembles receive the Margaret Hillis Award for Excellence in Choral Music: in 2002 with the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia and in 2015 with The Crossing. Collaborations have included the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, Mostly Mozart, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, National Sawdust, the Barnes Foundation, Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), the American Composers Orchestra, and The Big Sky Conservatory in Montana where The Crossing holds an annual residency. He has collaborated a number of times with artists Allora & Calzadilla, with works at Lisson Gallery (London), The National Gallery (Osaka, Japan), the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Art Gallery of Alberta (Canada).
In the 2018-19 season he will serve as music director for The Mile Long Opera, a new David Lang work for 1000 voices on the High Line in New York; he will also serve as chorus master for Lang’s prisoner of the state with the New York Philharmonic. He is a visiting resident artist at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan.
Artistic partners
BILL MORRISON, FILM MAKER
“Morrison’s world is one of the most breathtaking and haltingly disturbing cinematic realms of our time”.
– Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com, October 20, 2014
Bill Morrison‘s films often combine rare archival material set to contemporary music. His work was recently honored with a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, from October 2014 – March 2015. Morrison is a Guggenheim fellow and has received the Alpert Award for the Arts, an NEA Creativity Grant, Creative Capital, and a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. His theatrical projection design has been recognized with two Bessie awards and an Obie Award.
Morrison has collaborated with some of the most influential composers and performers of our time, including John Adams, Maya Beiser, Gavin Bryars, Dave Douglas, Richard Einhorn, Erik Friedlander, Bill Frisell, Philip Glass, Michael Gordon, Michael Harrison, Ted Hearne, Vijay Iyer, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Kronos Quartet, David Lang, David T. Little, Michael Montes, Steve Reich, Todd Reynolds, Aleksandra Vrebalov, and Julia Wolfe, among many others.
His work is distributed by Icarus Films in North America, and by the British Film Institute in the UK.
MICHAEL GORDON, COMPOSER
Michael Gordon’s music merges subtle rhythmic invention with incredible power embodying, in the words of The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross, “the fury of punk rock, the nervous brilliance of free jazz and the intransigence of classical modernism.”
Over the past 30 years, Gordon has produced a strikingly diverse body of work, ranging from large-scale pieces for high-energy ensembles to major orchestral commissions to works conceived specifically for the recording studio. Transcending categorization, this music represents the collision of mysterious introspection and brutal directness.
Gordon has been commissioned by The New World Symphony, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Stuttgart Ballet, the New World Symphony, the National Centre for the Performing Arts Beijing, the BBC Proms, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Settembre Musica, the Holland Music Festival, the Dresden Festival and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival, among others. His music has been performed at the Kennedy Center, Theatre De La Ville, Barbican Centre, Oper Bonn, Kölner Philharmonie and the Southbank Centre. The recipient of multiple awards and grants, Gordon has been honored by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Born in Miami Beach in 1956, Gordon holds a Bachelor of Arts from New York University and a Masters of Music from the Yale School of Music. He is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can.
His music is published by Red Poppy Music (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by G. Schirmer, Inc.
Photo Jill Steinberg