Astra

Ernst Toch, Charles Seeger, John J. Becker, Stefan Wolpe, Ruth Crawford-Seeger, Johanna Beyer, Robert Erickson, Kenneth Gaburo, Pauline Oliveros, Milton Babbitt

The Astra Choir with soloists, electronics and instrumental ensemble conducted by John McCaughey

This concert of unusual and adventurous American choral works from nine decades initiates the Astra Choir’s third project of first-recordings with the New York label New World Records. Starting from Ernst Toch’s recently rediscovered speech choruses with pioneering electronic manipulation from 1930, the program sets out a landscape of heterogeneous materials - secular, religious, experimental, tonal, meditative, political – that have lain mostly neglected in the 20th-century artistic terrain.