Five Boroughs Music Festival presents Terra Nova, a new concert-length song cycle created by the members of composer-collective Oracle Hysterical and performed in collaboration with the contemporary mixed-instrument quartet Hub New Music. Inspired by a range of ambitious, gritty (and sometimes naïve, cruel, and myopic) explorers, the songs of Terra Nova are by turns darkly ironic, heartrending, and straight-up fun (and occasionally a confounding mix of all three), coalescing into a powerful experience of both text and music.
Among its songs is a playful setting of John James Audubon’s descriptions of wood warblers by Brad Balliett, Dylan Greene’s depiction of the pre-Columbian exploration of North America by Chinese mariners, a melancholy view from Amelia Earhart’s cockpit by Majel Connery, Elliot Cole’s haunting setting of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s final letter home, and a Beastie Boys-like shout of the cruel Spanish Requirement of 1513, set by Doug Balliett.
