Golden Age
About This Project
Welcome to the Golden Age, the latest project by the MIFA Victory Players. This year’s theme celebrates diversity, resilience, and imagination in this complex moment in the history of the United States as we mark the Semiquincentennial.
In the summer of 2025, five composers spent a precious two weeks with the players in rehearsal, workshops, and deep conversations over many meals and coffees before returning home to work on the pieces that we will hear tonight. Given the complex times that we live in, tonight’s program invites us into a space to be in community through time.
Felipe Salles’s 1964 invites us into the startling times in Brazil’s presidential history. Emily Koh’s Unbound, playfully converses with the sensational South Korean Horror film, The Grudge even as Charles Shadle beguiles us with the Choctaw story of Dancing Rabbit. Kiegan Ryan’s insistently lush Totsuwa sweeps us up on a journey of beautiful fortitude. Finally, David Ibbett’s Crab Nebula gives us an exhilarating peek into the storied annals of the Chandra XRay Observatory.
Repertoire
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By Felipe Salles
Premiered May 28, 2026, Holyoke, MA
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By Emily Koh
Premiered May 28, 2026, Holyoke, MA
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By Charles Shadle
Premiered May 28, 2026, Holyoke, MA
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By Kiegan Ryan
Premiered May 28, 2026, Holyoke, MA
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By David Ibbett
Premiered May 28, 2026, Holyoke, MA
COMPOSERS
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I was born in São Paulo, Brazil, during the military dictatorship. The military took over in 1964, and it was not until 1989 that we were able to choose a democratically elected president. As a result, my mother and I voted for president, for the first time, together in 1989. 1964 is a piece that revisits a pivotal moment in Brazilian history, through a 1961 campaign speech by Jânio Quadros, the then soon to be the democratically elected President of Brazil. The politically unsavvy Jânio Quadros became a lame duck president shortly after being elected in 1961, and, in his narcissistic delusion, decided to renounce the presidency, in a power-grabbing gamble that did not pay off. He believed the people would flood the streets claiming for his reinstatement to the presidency, and he would come back more powerful. That never happened, but the move spiraled Brazil into a period of great political instability in 1961, that culminated in a military takeover in 1964.
The perfect storm of social unrest, due to a popular demand for redistribution of land and the creation of unions, allied to the fact that Jânio’s vice president, João Goulart, a socialist, was in China at the time of his renouncing, created a power vacuum and enough instability that the Brazilian military, encouraged by the C.I.A., decided to take over. To understand today’s reality, we need to go back in history and revisit periods of great instability, to hopefully avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
In this piece, I use the recording of one of Jânio’s speeches as a sound file, creating rhythms and musical phrasing through sound file edits. I transcribed these rhythms and melodies and used them as the thematic material for the piece. At times, the sound files are used as cues, and the ensemble plays a musical rendition of the speech along with them. At other times, the ensemble transitions between different materials derived from the speech. Pedantic and selfaggrandizing, the speech is projected behind the musicians, with translation, along with pictures from the era, which show the story of the social and political unrest. The intent is to show, through cognitive dissonance, how sinister a combination of both ridiculous and dangerous can be, and how this kind of populism can destroy the future of a country.
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Siyo ginali! Hello friend.
Redbirds (totsuwa) is a piece inspired by Redbirds, or more commonly known as cardinals. In Cherokee culture, we believe that Redbirds visit us to deliver both good and bad news. Redbirds is meant to celebrate the growing artístic achievements of Native composers, musicians, singer-songwriters, playwrights, actors, and directors. In recent years, there has been a large increase in Native representation across all kinds of media. In the piece, I incorporate familiar sounds from my home in Oklahoma, including folk melodies, church harmonies, and even the sound of porch wind chimes. In the sketch of Movement I, feel free to close your eyes and imagine that you’re at home, sitting on your porch on a lovely morning. In the sketch of Movement II, I ask you all to imagine a train coming to life. I believe that the Redbirds have come to visit our communities, telling us that the future is bright for Native artists across the globe.
Wado! Thank you!
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Supernovas release violent energies into the universe, and for over 25 years, the Chandra X-ray Observatory has been mapping these extreme objects and their role in shaping our cosmos. Supernova Symphony is an unfolding project showing the many wonders of the universe uncovered by Chandra.
The Crab Nebula was first detected in 1054 by Chinese astronomers who spotted a bright "guest star", and we now know that this was the cataclysmic supernova explosion which created the Crab Nebula. The nebula continues to expand and dissipate to this day, and has left a bright X-Ray signature showing clouds of gas and metals reaching out into the cosmos. In time, they will form new stars and new planets. All the gold and silver on Earth formed at the heart of exploding stars.
At the core of the nebula is an incredibly dense object called a pulsar: the remnant of the exploded star shrunk into a ball of pure neutrons. The pulsar is rapidly spinning at 30.2 rotations per second, with a rhythm so precise it can be used to make detailed measurements of other processes in the universe like gravitational waves. At the beginning of the piece, we hear the pulsar's light transformed into a sound wave of 30 Hz - a deep B flat - which is accompanied by pulsing melodies from the ensemble. Later, we wander in a meandering disk-shaped melody around the pulsar's ring, intermittently blasted by jets of plasma launched into interstellar space. The clarinet explores the delicate shells of expanding metals and gas. Over time, we become entranced and overwhelmed by the rhythmic energies of the pulsar system.
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'unbound' is a work in an ongoing series that explores the quiet and persistent ways of women. While the earlier pieces (unheard, unseen, unsaid) are shaped by erasure and constraint, unbound is a release. While the memory of restraint lingers, sometimes subtly and other times insistently, unbound eventually breaks out of these imposed limits and unapologetically expands to take up space. This is a gesture toward feminist agency, an imagining of a presence not just granted but claimed.
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What could be more charming than a bunny, one of Nature’s gentlest creatures, innocently cavorting in a springtime landscape?
Dancing Rabbit Creek (Bok Chukfi Ahilha) is a small stream in rural Nuxobee County, Mississippi. On September 30, 1830, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek—leading to the removal of the vast majority of the Choctaw people to what is now Oklahoma—was signed by representatives of the administration of President Andrew Jackson, and a delegation of Choctaws. There was bad faith, manipulation and chicanery on the part of the Federal Government, but some Choctaws also found advantage in the treaty. It is particularly ironic that this document was signed at Dancing Rabbit Creek, as Chukfi, the rabbit, is the trickster figure in traditional Choctaw storytelling.
Beast fables regularly derive humor from imagining prey as predator, and Chukfi often behaves in veryRun-rabbit-like ways, running repeated confidence schemes that victimize the credulous other animals. Chukfi’s energetic games of fraud and deception provide a model for much of what happens in Dancing Rabbit.
Charles Shadle