Great Noise Ensemble & The Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring Celebrate Earth Day

March 17, 2011 - PRLog -- “Quantum physics has recently confirmed what shamans and mystics, poets and musicians have long known: the universe is more like music than like matter. It may well be that our most fundamental relationship to the great mysteries is one of listening. Through sustained, concentrated attention to the fullness of the present moment, we listen for the breath of being, the voice of God.” –John Luther Adams

Composer John Luther Adams is known not only for his compositions that summon and embody the vistas of his home in Alaska, but for his tireless activism and interest in environmental causes and his passion for creating sound spaces that evoke a sense of “vastness, separateness and solitude.” (–Alex Ross)

On April 22, 2011, Great Noise Ensemble and The Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring present a program in celebration of Earth Day, featuring John Luther Adams’s Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing. Adams describes the work as “a work of musical contemplation, an attempt to consecrate a small time and space for extraordinary listening (…) My hope has been not so much to compose a piece of music as to create — in essentially musical terms, with no external references — a wholeness of music, a sonic presence somehow equivalent to that of a vast landscape.”

For this performance Great Noise Ensemble is hosted by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring, participants in the Green Sanctuary program of the Unitarian Universalist Association, who are “dedicated, through individual and collective efforts, to becoming better stewards of the Earth”. Visit www.uucss.org to learn more about UUCSS and www.uua.org to learn about Unitarian Universalism and the Green Sanctuary initiative.

Tickets are available online at www.greatnoiseensemble.com and at the door: $15 General Admission, $10 Students/Seniors.

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About Great Noise Ensemble: Great Noise Ensemble was born in 2005 through a listing placed on Craigslist.org by composer and conductor Armando Bayolo. Seven area musicians united by their passion for new music answered, and from this core group the ensemble has grown into the twenty instrumentalists and two singers which now comprise its core membership. Since its first concert in January 2006, Great Noise Ensemble has become one of the most important ensembles in the District of Columbia’s burgeoning new music scene, winning The Washington Area Music Association’s 2007 “WAMMIE” Award for Best Chamber Ensemble and presenting concerts in venues ranging from intimate community concert spaces like the Patricia M. Sitar Center to prestigious locales such as the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Gallery and Sculpture Garden and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.