POSTPONED: Philip Glass & Jerry Quickley Whistleblower

“The most powerful composer of our time...What Glass is doing is changing the face of music for our time and all time.” —The Daily Telegraph

In 2013 Edward Snowden copied and leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) that revealed numerous global surveillance programs. However shocking the extent and breadth of these government programs were, this act merely punctuated the sweeping change in contemporary society enabled by exponentially more powerful computers and electronic communications networks. Employing an original text set against a score performed live, spoken word artist Jerry Quickley and legendary contemporary composer Philip Glass share their personal and visceral musings, reflections and emotions as they struggle to understand this moment in history with their piece, Whistleblower. The evening will be paired with a work entitled Is Infinity Odd or Even? with text by Arturo Bejar and music written and performed by Philip Glass.

Philip Glass is an American icon. Through his operas, symphonies, compositions for his own ensemble and wide-ranging collaborations, he has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times with such well-known and highly-regarded works as Einstein on the Beach, Koyaanisqatsi and La Belle et La Bête, among others. Glass is also the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, film and in popular music simultaneously. Glass’s art festival in Big Sur has commissioned Quickley, one of the most well-known and well-regarded performance poets in the United States, as the librettist for a triptych of operatic melodramas they are creating together about the modern human condition. Whistleblower is the first of these three commissions.