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Death By Drowning

Jonathan Berger

A ‘fish out of water’ represents the oppressed, who both figuratively, and, in the case of Eric Garner,

literally

could not breathe. 

The title ‘Death by Drowning’ refers to a folk story

about the ‘wise men of Chelm’,

an imaginary shtetl inhabited by fools,

in which a fish is sentenced to be drowned

in the lake

as punishment for having slapped the Rabbi

who bought it for the Shabbat meal.

Described as “gripping” by both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, “poignant”, “richly evocative” (San Francisco Chronicle), “taut, and hauntingly beautiful” (NY Times), Jonathan Berger’s recent works deal with both consciousness and conscience. Berger’s “dissonant but supple” compositions are often inspired by science and the human condition, including the adaptation of satellite imaging data to turn the dispersal of an oil spill into music (Jiyeh), spatial representation of brain activations of a schizophrenic hallucination (Theotokia), and sonic expression of the chemical spectroscopy of cancer (Diameters).  Thrice commissioned by The National Endowment for the Arts, Berger has also received major commissions from The Mellon and Rockefeller Foundations, Chamber Music America, and numerous chamber music societies and ensembles. A winner of the Rome Prize, Berger was composer-in-residence at Spoleto Festival USA, and is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. He has held research grants from DARPA, the Wallenberg Foundation and others. Berger is the Denning Family Provostial Professor in Music at Stanford University, where he teaches composition, music theory, and cognition at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He was the founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SICA, now the Stanford Arts Institute) and founding director of Yale University’s Center for Studies in Music Technology.

© 2017 by The Modern Violin Ensemble.

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