After announcing an ambitious 2024-2025 season this spring, the Dallas Chamber Symphony hit an important milestone: releasing its debut album.
“A recording is going to be a milestone for any arts group and certainly it is for our orchestra. We’ve wanted to record an album for some time and the pandemic gave us a good reason to do so,” said Richard McKay, the orchestra’s Music and Artistic Director.
Chasing Home features two dance suites: Joseph Thalken’s Chasing Home and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite. In 2017, Bruce Wood Dance and the Dallas Chamber Symphony presented the world premiere of Chasing Home with a grant from the Donna Wilhelm Family Fund. The Syrian migrant crisis that dominated the news cycle at the time inspired Thalken and Albert Drake, the project’s choreographer.
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McKay credited collaborations with companies like Bruce Wood Dance during the orchestra’s early years for developing a solid artistic foundation. He wanted this first album to reflect the orchestra’s history.
“It was a major project for us at the time and we thought it an important part of our story,” McKay said.
This modern piece is paired with Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite, a piece Martha Graham commissioned for her dance company and premiered in 1944. The story of the ballet centers on a young couple creating a home in the Pennsylvania hills in the early 1800s. The music is evocative of the Shaker community, introducing the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts” to a wider audience. The work is considered quintessentially American.
The Scene
“Both of them center on themes of belonging and new beginnings, fresh starts and so we thought the pair made a really nice album,” McKay said.
What do these pieces say about the migrant experience?
“Perhaps the best way to answer that is to point out how both ballets end and that is with the protagonists who find a new home ultimately and find a way to overcome hardship, and find a way, as Aaron Copland put it, to go forth confidently in a new home,” McKay said.
The artwork emphasizes the music’s themes and the ballet’s production history.
“The angularity speaks to the angularity of Martha Graham’s sets and the minimalist designs,’ McKay said. “You’ve got a cloud on the horizon and that’s symbolic of drama or something foreboding on the horizon, but also there’s this doorway opening up to a new life, in this case, to a new city. That’s our concept of the album and also each of these works.”
The orchestra recorded the album at Moody Performance Hall in the Dallas Arts District during a time of great uncertainty.
“We convened in April 2021, all wearing masks, of course, at this time. It was a project that kept us busy at the time when we weren’t performing public shows yet,” McKay said.
The pandemic posed unique challenges for the recording process. The musicians — 11 players for Chasing Home and 13 players for Appalachian Spring Suite — needed to sit further apart than they usually would. Because McKay and the musicians were masked, they couldn’t see facial expressions and relied on reading each other’s body language.
“Musicians at that time were not performing nearly as regularly, if at all. We were requiring them to keep up their jobs and to be ready to go when it was time to record. That’s hard to do when you’re not performing regularly. It’s hard to come out of the pandemic, sit down in a rehearsal and be ready to go in a recording studio essentially within a couple of days, and especially on such challenging repertoire. Both of these pieces are very hard to play, and they are scored in such a way that makes them, due to their very open or very tight harmonies, very hard to tune, very hard to play together, very hard to get a good sound. This is a very challenging repertoire, recorded in a very challenging environment,” McKay said.
After the rehearsal period, the orchestra invited a small audience to watch the first take of the recording. The response was a tiny but enthusiastic applause.
“In spite of all of our challenges, our musicians did a really great job,” McKay said.
It took three years to produce this album.
“When I look at this album, it is very attentive to details. It has had many contributors, many people ensuring that every aspect of it is excellent. And that takes time,” McKay said.
Decades after its premiere, Appalachian Spring Suite is beloved for its music and choreography. Orchestras often include the music in its repertoire and Martha Graham’s choreography is replicated regularly.
“That is a great exemplar of how you would like music and dance to work together and also have their own lives in the art form separately,” McKay said.
McKay hopes that history will rhyme for Chasing Home.
“An important first step is to get the music published in such a way that other dance companies can listen to it and consider using it and also it is an important step to getting the piece just performed by other music groups generally over time. I think that this is just the start of the journey for the dance and the music featured on Chasing Home,” McKay said.
Learn more: Dallas Chamber Symphony
Read a review of Chasing Home from our partners at The Dallas Morning News.
