Sympatheia

16 voices (four SATB groups), four percussionists, and live electronics (and amplification)
2020
Processing for live electronics created by John Thompson

Commissioned by and written for the Savannah Philharmonic Orchestra & Chorus

Notes

Sympatheia is a reaction to (and perhaps also a reflection on) the social dynamics and divisions that, for someone living in the United States, became evident during the 2016 presidential election cycle. As anyone with a minimal interest in human history would note, this problem was hardly a new thing: for each century of the past millennium, we can find plenty of examples of issues that created discord among any given society. What seemed new, however, was a globalized world (before 2016, I had already noted a similar division in South America and another one in Europe) and how the new technologies (the internet and, in particular, social media) amplified the tensions.

In this context, I sought to create a musical work which, for 15 minutes, could help one to remember how easily different elements can vibrate together (following the principle of sympathetic resonance), as sort of a metaphor for the fact that we all have more in common than we tend to remember. I also wanted to reflect on some philosophical ideas that are over 2,300 years old and come handy at this time –those of stoicism. The title of the work is a connection to the physical phenomenon of sympathetic resonance as well as to the stoic concept of sympatheia (which proposes that there is an “ interconnectedness and mutual interdependence [among] all things in the universe”, as the Roman emperor and stoic thinker Marcus Aurelius described it). – M.G.