05/26/2026
DownEast New Music: By the Sea
July 19 4pm
https://our.show/downeast
Returning to The Waldo with the their fresh approach to classical, DownEast New Music presents By the Sea.
Built around two works that evoke landscapes, By the Sea shows how music creates connections between people and places, bridging the tangible and the intangible. With stunning virtuosity, kaleidoscopic color, and soaring lines, this program transports the listener to places real and imagined.
Pulitzer-winner Kevin Puts’s mixed septet Seven Seascapes depicts seven versions of the mercurial ocean, inspired by quotes from writers including Virgina Woolf, Douglas Adams, and Emily Dickinson.
In The Companion Guide to Rome, Andrew Norman paints a musical picture of the man-made, using a string trio to take the audience on a tour of Rome, visiting nine storied churches in the Eternal City.
Searsmont-based Robert Sirota also calls on the past in his Elegy to a Lost World as he recalls the lost idealism of youth. Written for his son for a set of elegiac pieces for viola, Sirota uses the viola’s full expressive range as he remembers a past that may never have been real.
Paul Lansky and Emily Praetorius craft their pieces out of the techniques and abilities of specific instruments, building a bridge between the performer, the instrument, and the soundworld. Written for horn, violin, and piano, Etudes and Parodies uses idiomatic gestures for horn as the seed for each movement, drawing upon Lansky’s lived experience as a horn player performing in chamber settings. In Sans Serif, Emily Praetorius imagines how to bring the flute and cello closer together, despite their differences as instruments.
In this sonic journey across the sea, the listener will experience a wide range of high-flying emotions before returning to a comforting place “where waves are kind.”
