Hugh Levick, our artistic director, talks about this year’s theme, “Abundance”:
Art is symbolic of an invisible reality, the reality of Spirit. It is through works that the ordinary can open to the extraordinary. But this opening can occur, can work, only so long as we have continued to cultivate the desire and knowledge to remain receptive to these works that are unconscious horizons of expectation – the expectation of the unexpected.
Today’s cultural currents are often very reductive. We are more than we are led to believe we are. In fact, we are vast expanses of being, knowing, and expression.
“New music aspires to be the voice of everything that refuses to be submerged” (Adorno), and the music presented at the HEAR NOW Music Festival is a language, a grammar of shape, movement, distance, time and timbre. It is, as Wallace Stevens says,
“A gold-feathered bird singing
In the palm at the end of the mind
beyond the last thought…”
With joy and determination HEAR NOW joins creators throughout the world who give back as counter-gift for what they have received; who exclaim to us what they have heard before it is lost; who, moved by the insistence of that which does not yet exist, overcome the work’s resistance to being born by engaging the Spirit in a reckless and savage seeking.
“New music is written from a place of abundance, and when we can appreciate this music, it is from a place of abundance in ourselves.”
— Anonymous
