The brainchild of composer Bright Sheng, “The Intimacy of Creativity” aims to bring a workshopping culture to chamber music, organized around a course of rehearsals, discussions, and performances of music by invited composers.

Even if the music flows ineluctably from measure to measure, from phrase to phrase, and from section to section, is there ever a moment of “too much”?

There are so many wild possibilities created by turning the voice into an instrument, rather than merely the arbiter of a text. But none of the pieces by us composers here at Essentially Choral do this.

How can a composer synthesize music and text, without creating perceptual distractions?