Having just submitted my PhD, I am immensely excited to be returning home to Seattle for The Esoterics’ concerts as part of their POLYPHONOS competition. My new commission is being performed on their “Consolo: The Reimagined Requiem” concerts the weekend of October 5th.

Appropriately, this has become a very close-to-home musical project. From 1942 to 1945, 120,000 people in the western United States were forcibly incarcerated for no reason other than their Japanese ancestry. This happened within living memory. The Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutional. Those who were living on Bainbridge Island were the first to be taken away. This summer I was fortunate enough to speak with Kay Sakai Nakao and Lilly Kodama, who were imprisoned at Manzanar and Minidoka “relocation centers” during these years, and I’ve set their words in my piece, “Uprooted”. Kay, Lilly and countless others have in fact shared their story many times, in hopes that nothing like this may happen again. 

Working on this commission has been an extremely meaningful experience to me, and there are other wonderful works by living composers on the program as well including fellow winners Ily Matthew Maniano and Anna-Karin Klockar, and Dale Trumbore. Concerts are in Seattle on October 5th, West Seattle on the 6th, and Tacoma on the 7th: http://www.theesoterics.org/concerts/season-2018/consolo