Beth Willer on the creative process

Lorelei is not just a performing ensemble—we are a creative ensemble, committed to commissioning new work that offers new perspective.

Creativity is a process.

We are so grateful to you, and to all of our supporters, for believing in our work and the time and space required to create. In recent months, as we have launched several new projects that uphold Lorelei’s mission to expand and deepen the repertoire for women’s and treble voices, I have been reminded of the beauty of that process, especially when it is not rushed.

Lorelei has been gathering for creative retreats in homes of our most ardent supporters for years. In October, we took this process one step further. We brought four composer-performers and Lorelei singers to Baltimore to begin work on a fully collaborative program exploring breath as an endangered resource in our individual and collective lives. The result will ultimately be a 70-minute program, co-written by four creative artists from disparate corners of the contemporary music world, from jazz to hip hop to pop to contemporary classical. The time spent over those few days in Baltimore was truly ground-up creative work, and perhaps some of the most fruitful days of collaboration in our time together as an ensemble. Rather than requesting complete, polished scores, I asked composers Charlotte Greve, Wendel Patrick, Ken Thomson, and Jason Treuting to each bring sketches of their ideas—ideas that may or may not work, ideas that push the boundaries of genre and technique.

Ground-breaking, cross-genre work requires time and a space that encourages risk-taking, building and rebuilding of ideas until we discover what works. One by one, we read and revised and read and revised these sketches. As the composers and singers began to know each other, and each other’s language and instruments, these rough sketches turned into pearls of musical material. After three months of incubation, we will reconvene in January to work from draft scores of the full program for eight amplified voices, alto saxophone, bass clarinet, drum set, vibraphone, keyboards, and live processing. It is this process and this seemingly luxurious creative lead time that allows Lorelei to pursue an experimental and uniquely impactful program like BREATHE, written for these singers and these composers/players, responding to the time and place that we are living.

In November we had the great pleasure to premiere a program at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. MASS MoCA is a unique facilitator of creative work—not just visual art, but performance art. The premiere of LOOK UP, commenting on worlds above and below, featured two world premieres—Elijah Daniel Smith’s Suspended in Spin and Christopher Cerrone’s long-awaited and brilliantly intense Beaufort Scales, with visuals by Hannah Wasileski. This, too, was a project that developed over years, building on ideas and relationships that had time to simmer.

Lorelei has commissioned more than 65 new works with your help, and the best commissions have always resulted from a relationship built over time, in multiple fruitful encounters with someone who takes the time to know us and what we are about. And in order to cultivate relationships with the creative voices that inspire us—composers, video artists, choreographers, and lighting designers—we need you, the people who truly know Lorelei and Lorelei’s work, and who want to see us continue down this road.

Thank you for your continued support, and for being along for the (sometimes unpredictable) ride that leads to new and relevant music.

With gratitude,

Beth Willer, Artistic Director