Sing Out Strong: Voting As Freedom

Sunday, September 15th at 3:00pm

On Sunday, September 15 at 3pm Milton Community Concerts will be embarking on its tenth anniversary season with a timely concert event called "Sing Out Strong: Voting As Freedom". This concert is a collaboration between MCC and White Snake Projects. Performers include singers Aurora Martin and Chihiro Asano, pianist Jamie Lorusso, and guest speaker/host Cerise Lim Jacobs, founder of WSP. The concert will take place at First Parish of Milton, 535 Canton Avenue.

White Snake Projects has developed this program as a part of a multi-year community-based project called "Sing Out Strong: Emancipated Voices". For this concert composers from around the country have set texts from students, immigrants, and other members of the local Boston community to music. These texts were written in response to the question: "What do voting and freedom mean to you?". Composers young and old submitted their musical responses to these texts in a Call for Entries in 2023. Eleven composers were chosen to set these texts to music for this concert, ranging from young emerging composers to established award-winning ones, and representing various socio-economic, age, gender, and racial backgrounds. These composers collaborated with the writers, four of whom are students at Boston International Newcomers Academy, a public high school devoted to recently arrived immigrants. The result is a program of songs featuring many different musical styles that entertain, outrage,and educate at a time when the issue of voting is a critical one.

Admission for this concert is PAY AS YOU CAN, with a suggested donation of $25 general/$15 senior/Free for 18 and under (tickets available at the door only). The venue is accessible, and free parking is plentiful.

A portion of the proceeds for this concert will go to support the Movement Voter Fund.

Sing Out Strong Program

Sing Out Strong Texts

Artist Headshots and Bios

Chihiro Asano, a mezzo-soprano originally from Japan and now based in Boston, has achieved remarkable accomplishments in her education and career. She earned a Master of Music in Vocal Pedagogy in 2022 and a Graduate Diploma in Vocal Performance in 2023, both from the New England Conservatory. Chihiro was recognized as a Puerto Rico District Winner in the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition.

The 2023-2024 season highlighted Chihiro’s exceptional talent as a performer of new music, featuring her in several cross-disciplinary new operas and original compositions. Her notable roles included Shizue in a Portland Opera production and Naomi in a Boston Opera Collaborative presentation. Chihiro made an impressive debut as Hansel in the Boston Lyric Opera’s Artist Classroom Visits production of “Hansel and Gretel” in 2023, engaging school students across the Boston area. In 2024, she portrayed Cinderella in the Boston Lyric Opera’s Opera101, showcasing her versatility across various prestigious musical venues in Massachusetts, including White Snake Opera, MassOpera, Boston Opera Collaborative, NEMPAC, Nightingale Vocal Ensemble, Cambridge Chamber Ensemble, and Capella Clausura.

Born and raised in greater Boston, James Lorusso is a pianist with professional experience in everything from art song and chamber music to musical theater and jazz improvisation. Currently studying collaborative piano at New England Conservatory, James works for the voice and opera department and appears regularly in the school’s Liederabend series, for which he once performed the complete songs of Rachmaninoff’s magnificent Op. 34. Last summer, he was a collaborative piano fellow at the Aspen Music Festival, and in 2019, he was a staff pianist for College Light Opera Company, helping to open nine shows in a single summer. This past November, he joined the team at White Snake Projects for their 2023 production of Let’s Celebrate. James holds degrees in piano performance from Ithaca College and McGill University. Currently, he is also the pianist and organist at St. Irene’s Parish in Carlisle MA and the accompanist and pianist coach at Wayland Public Schools.

Aurora Martin is known throughout New England for her colorful, warm soprano. Aurora Martin won 2nd place in 2023 The American Prize Friedrich & Virginia Schorr Memorial Awards for Women in Opera. She was named a semi-finalist in the prestigious Partners for the Arts 9th National Opera Competition in 2022. She joined the ensembles of Boston Baroque and Boston Lyric Opera in 2022. Aurora collaborates regularly with Odyssey Opera, The Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, Cambridge Chamber Ensemble, Sounds of Stow, Opera del West, and as performer and board member of Opera on Tap. She joined Opera Company of Middlebury as a 2021 Young Artist, covering “Agnès Sorel” in The Maid of Orleans.

Following a love and aptitude for baroque music, Aurora can be found performing with some of Boston’s, and the nation’s, leading organizations. She performed the role of Dalila in Cambridge Chamber Ensemble’s September 2023 production of Handel’s Samson. She had her debut with Boston Baroque in Bach’s B minor Mass in October 2022 and looks forward to singing in their exciting ’23-‘24 season She sings with both Emmanuel Music and Marsh Chapel. She looks forward to solo performances of Mozart’s Mass in C minor and Requiem this spring.

Solo concert performances include Haydn’s Harmoniemesse Hob. XXII/14, Satie’s Socrates, Mahler’s Das Knaben Wunderhorn, Beethoven’s Mass in C Major, Mozart’s Coronation Mass, Saint-Saëns’ Christmas Oratorio, and Fauré’s Requiem and Handel’s Messiah. Operatic highlights include Pamina, Micaëla, Dalila, Miss Silvertone, Noèmie, Liesgen, and Mieke. Aurora holds a MM from The New England Conservatory and degrees in Music and Chemistry from Virginia Tech.

Praised as “haunting and beautiful” and “a musical standout,” the compositions of baritone and composer Joel Balzun continue to receive performances and recognition worldwide. Recent performances include those at New York City’s Merkin Hall, the Kennedy Center, and as a part of competition and recital programs in the USA and Europe. He was a multiple prize-winner in the SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers, after winning top prizes the Dallas Winds’ “Call for Fanfares”, tbe Classical Marimba League International Composition Competition and the National Broadcast Orchestra’s Galaxie Rising Star Composers’ Competition, in which he won both the Young Composers Prize and the Grand Prize. He has also been named a finalist for the prestigious ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Awards. He has been a guest presenter and composer at the CBDNA and CFAMC National Conferences, as well as at the NATS Cal-West Regional Conference.

Mr. Balzun’s music has been performed in Canada, the United States, Costa Rica, Denmark, Taiwan and the United Kingdom, by ensembles such as Alberta Winds, Calgary Civic Symphony, Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, CCM Wind Orchestra, Dallas Winds, Eastman Wind Orchestra, the National Broadcast Orchestra of Canada, La Orquestra Vientos de Costa Rica, and Windago. Additional performances include those by Cadillac Moon Ensemble, Standing Wave Ensemble, and such luminary soloists as Corey Hamm and Megan Moore. His music has been broadcast on CBC Radio 2 and Espace Musique. A selection of Mr. Balzun’s music is currently published by C. Alan Publications, Lovebird Music and NewMusicShelf. He is an active member of ASCAP, CFAMC and SOCAN.

For pioneering NYC composer, bandleader, and multi-instrumentalist Kitty Brazelton, music is personal, and the personal is universal. Winner of two Opera America America awards for Female Composers, the Copland Fund for Music and an NPR-broadcast choral commission from world premier choir VocalEssence, among others, the irrepressible Brazelton has always championed music’s power to unite—across genre, across tradition, across language. As a teenager studying Tzotzil, a language spoken by the Maya in the remote mountains above the Yucatan, Brazelton began to believe in a kind of universal language that would transcend boundaries. This spirit of radical inclusivity has propelled her dazzling work across decades and into the now, shapeshifting from 70’s psychedelic chamber-folk Musica Orbis and ‘80s anthemic new wave Hide the Babies to 9-piece electroacoustic Dadadah and ‘90s cyberpunk trio What is it Like to Be a Bat?

Most recently, after leaving teaching to compose full time, Brazelton has been delighted to team with Boston-based MASARY Studios to provide music for fours hours of live a cappella choral music for FirstWorks Providence RI’s street festival. in early December 2023. She wrote two hours—”we sang it twice!” During multi-media installation Recursion and Release, attendees physically embarked on an immersive journey through spatialized sound and light as they explored three separate environments of the venerable (1847) downtown Providence Grace Church campus—digital audio manipulation, video projection and dynamic lighting designed by collaborator Jeremy Stewart, MASARY. In the sanctuary itself, strikingly unamplified but generative source for sound and light throughout, Brazelton’s vocal quintet sang newly composed polyphony, with text from American Buddhist Jack Kornfield’s guided “Meditation on Letting Go.”

Xavier Nathaniel Bueno was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, and was raised in Visalia California. Bueno always had a love for music since learning his first instrument, the clarinet when he was 9. Later Bueno picked up a guitar and began composing his own music when he was 13. Bueno’s love for composing was realized in his junior year of high school his high school jazz performed an arraignment he made for a public audience. Bueno won several awards after his passion for composing had been revealed. These awards include the Visual and Performing Arts Award from the Visalia Unified School District, An Audience Award during Fresno’s 5th Annual Art Song Competition, and a scholarship from CSU Summer Arts. Bueno has recently graduated from Fresno State with a B.A. in Music Theory and Composition and is interested in composing for visual media and youth music groups. Bueno is still composing and performing in the Central Valley.

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Composer Carlos R. Carrillo Cotto holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music (BM), Yale University (MM) and the University of Pennsylvania (PhD). His teachers have included Tania León, Samuel Adler, Warren Benson, Joseph Schwantner, Christopher Rouse, Jacob Druckman, Martin Bresnick, Roberto Sierra, George Crumb, James Primosch, Jay Reise and Steve Mackey. Dr. Carrillo is the recipient of numerous awards including the Bearns Prize, the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, BMI and ASCAP awards. He has been commissioned by Music and the Anthology for the Da Capo Chamber Players, the New York Youth Symphony, Concert Artists Guild and the Pennsylvania Music Teachers Association. In 2004 he received a commission from the American Composers Orchestra, the second such work commissioned for ACO by the BMI Foundation, Inc./ Carlos Surinach Fund.

Dr. Carrillo’s music has been performed at the American Composers Orchestra’s Sonido de las Americas Festival, the Casals Festival, and played by the Young Musician Foundation’s Debut Orchestra, Sequitur, Network for New Music, Prism Quartet, Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, New York Youth Symphony, and members of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. Performances abroad include Lontano Ensemble in London, Trio Morelia in Mexico and Esclats in Spain.

In 2002, his symphonic work Cantares was featured at the inaugural “Synergy: Composer and Conductor” program presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and American Symphony Orchestra League. In 1998 he received one of the first Aaron Copland Awards from the Copland Heritage Association and he was the 2001-2003 Van Lier Emerging Composer Fellow with the ACO. In the spring of 2005 Dr. Carrillo was invited to the inaugural John Duffy Composers Institute as part of the 9th Annual Virginia Arts Festival. In 2007 he received a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. From 2007 to 2009 Dr. Carrillo was musical director of the Wabash Valley Youth Symphony. Recent performances include The Gathering Grounds, commissioned by the Casals Festival and a performance of selections from the opera in progress La Pasión segun Antígona Perez at the Pregones Threatre in the Bronx. He has taught composition at DePauw University, Reed College, and the Conservatory of Music in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In the Spring of 2013 Dr. Carrillo was appointed Assistant Professor of Composition-Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Marieke de Koker is a South African singer, composer and actress based in New York City. She was a 2021 Emerging Artist at the Windybrow Arts Center in South Africa where she was interviewed on the ETV morning show about her interdisciplinary piece Born of Angels, honoring Nelson Mandela in the wake of the 2021 national riots. In 2022 she joined the International Contemporary Ensemble’s Ensemble Evolution, performing improvisatory and experimental chamber works as well as new premieres. Her 2021 song cycle Never Again (a collaboration with Kenyan poet Valentine Kizito) won the DePaul Concerto Competition and will receive an orchestral premiere in Chicago this coming Spring. In Fall 2023 Marieke will be premiering three new song cycles: Blessed Be Our Martyrs, Earth Child and The Curse of Eve. Marieke has performed in opera workshops, world premieres, off-Broadway shows and classical operas. She has appeared with RSG radio, Brooklyn Theatre TV, Gauteng Philharmonic Orchestra, Johannesburg Opera, Bronx Opera, Overtone Industries, Shakespeare Opera Theater, Really Spicy Opera, Windy City Performing Arts, the Art Song Preservation Society of New York, the Mosaic Composer’s Collective and the Academy of Fortepiano Performance. Marieke is a founding board member of Canadian queer opera company Opéra Queens. As Publishing Team Lead at the Àkójọpọ̀ Music Foundation she is leading the development of a new ecommerce publishing platform for Pan-African composers.

Jamie Klenetsky Fay is a vocalist, composer, and passionate advocate of new music. She creates thought-provoking experiences for audiences about meaningful topics, including climate change, immigration, and gentrification.

She’s a long-time member of the ASCAP Adventurous Programming Award-winning C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective, where she’s sung in over 60 premieres of new work. Her choral and vocal compositions have been performed across the United States by C4, C3LA, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, among others.

Jamie’s premiered multiple choral pieces with C4, including “Seawall,” which has been performed in United States, France, and Scotland. Her latest piece, “The Ogre,” was written in collaboration with the artist Zsuzsanna Ardó and will premiere in Manhattan in March 2024.

Jamie lives in New Jersey with her husband and two cats, and works as a civic technologist for federal government agencies.

Cole Reyes (b. 1998) is a composer, educator, conductor, and performer originally from Chicagoland. His music explores the intersection between personal experience and the world beyond.

He has collaborated with artists such as JACK Quartet, the Rhythm Method Quartet, Bergamot Quartet, Juventas New Music Ensemble, BlackBox Ensemble, Del Sol Quartet, Transient Canvas, Hypercube, and Unheard-of//Ensemble among others. Recent commissions include those from ARTZenter and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the National Orchestral Institute, Six Degrees Singers, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C., the Victory Players, and a consortium for percussion led by Luciano Medina.

He has been a composition fellow at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, the National Orchestral Institute and Festival, the Lake George Music Festival, and others. His primary composition teachers include Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, Robert Honstein, Roshanne Etezady, Christopher Stark, and LJ White. He is co-founder of Telos Consort, a professional chamber ensemble based in New York City dedicated to the performance and curation of new music that features saxophones, strings, and piano. He currently pursues doctoral studies at the University of Michigan.

Bold, dramatic, with an exquisite attention to detail, Ethan Soledad (b. 1999) is a Filipino-American composer whose work aims to express emotions in their most raw form. An experienced singer, he incorporates drama in his work, emphasizing the importance of silence and one’s perception of time. Ethan’s music draws from a wide palette of compositional styles and colors ranging from impressionism and neoclassicism to post-minimalism and the avant-garde. His musical style is marked by unapologetic expression, dynamic extremes, and the ability to do more with less but never shying away from doing more with more.

His music has been performed and recognized by ensembles such as New York Youth Symphony (First Music Commission Honorable Mention), the Greater Miami Youth Symphony, Choral Arts Initiative, Fifth House Ensemble, Bent Frequency, the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble (ECCE), Fear No Music, Crossing Borders Music, True Concord Voices and Orchestra, The Choral Project, the Beo String Quartet, and the Metropolitan Youth Orchestra of New York.

He is a teacher at the Shepherd School of Music pre-college program, teaching music theory, composition, and aural skills to advanced high school students. Additionally he was a young artist at DACAMERA Houston, engaging in outreach programs with Harris county elementary and middle schools.

He graduated with his Bachelor of Arts in Music at Florida State University 2021 and is currently pursuing his Master of Music in Composition at Rice University studying under Pierre Jalbert, Shih-Hui Chen, and Karim Al-Zand.

His previous composition teachers include Liliya Ugay and Orlando Jacinto Garcia.

Del’Shawn is an award-winning musician, author, educator, and arts equity advocate. As a soloist, he has won awards from competitions such as American Prize and the Metropolitan International Music Festival, while making solo debuts on national and international stages. In January 2023, he premiered the role of George in Tim Hick’s and Kendra Leonard’s new short opera Water Rising.

As composer, he has premiered new works within and outside of the U.S. premiered with numerous organizations and ensembles like the Julius Quartet, the Cincinnati Song Initiative, Really Spicy Opera, and Babεl to name a few. Del’Shawn had four new art songs premiered at the Operation Opera Festival at Gonzaga University and a new art song premiered apart of the Source Song Festival under the tutelage of Libby Larsen and David Evan Thomas. Del’Shawn was one of ten black composers that was selected to participate in the inaugural NATS Composer Mentoring Program by Tom Cipullo and Lori Laitman, during which he was mentored by celebrated composer Juliana Hall. In March 2023, Del’Shawn had his first opera Cook Shack premiered with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis with librettist Samiya Bashir through their New Works Collective. Currently, Del’Shawn was recently commissioned by Experiments in Opera to write a new opera with librettist Joanie Cunningham that will premiere in 2024.

As an educator and children’s book author, Del’Shawn passionately works with community arts organizations to ensure that children regardless of socio-economic background have access to the transformative power of the arts. He is a board member of Art Song Colorado (program and finance committee), Inside the Orchestra and serves on the board DEI committees of the South Bend Symphony Orchestra and Thompson Street Opera Company.

Kangyi Zhang is a flutist-composer whose programmatic music often highlights important historical events. As a flutist, he has performed on various stages in Singapore, Malaysia and the United States. He studied music in Singapore and the United States (Brown University, Northwestern University, University of California at Los Angeles). His composition mentors are Bernard Tan Tiong Gie, Gerald Shapiro, Jay Alan Yim, Bruce Broughton, Drew Schnurr and Ian Krouse. His music has been performed in Singapore, United States (California, New York, Florida, Alabama), United Kingdom and Ukraine. Notably, Kangyi’s trombone concerto “Let Freedom Ring!” premiered by Wes Lebo and the NAFA Wind Orchestra was broadcasted on KDLG Alaska public radio “Prevailing Winds” and the Missouri Symphony podcast “Summer Nights”.