Sandbox Percussion with vocalists Elspeth Davis and Melissa Wimbish will work alongside composer Jessica Meyer to develop an hour-long program for two vocalists and percussion quartet. The central work is Jessica Meyer’s 20 minutes of action, a work commissioned for this program and scored for all six performers. In 2016, the trial of Brock Turner was yet another controversial episode in an ongoing debate about rape culture, privilege in the criminal justice system, and campus safety. In court, Chanel Miller read aloud a letter to her attacker that has since been read millions of times and has influenced legislation in California. This new work will be a setting of select quotes from the letter Chanel Miller read aloud in court to Brock Turner. Jessica plans to set specific sentences from the letter as well as text from Chanel’s recently published memoir, Know My Name. 

The remainder of the program consists of pre-existing works and arrangements using this instrumentation. The program is vocally-focused - the centerpiece of the evening literally deals with the voice of a single person, and each of the other works frames this voice in a different way. Barbara Strozzi’s Che si può fare is presented here in a new arrangement for voice and mallet percussion. Rebecca Saunders O sets Molly Bloom’s monologue from James Joyce’s Ulysses - a stream-of-consciousness collage of words that are always present, but only sometimes understood. Osvaldo Golijov’s Mariel is an instrumental depiction of a moment of grief - arranged for this program for both vocalists singing wordlessly and percussion.