The story of classical music is the story of a family tree hundreds of years old. It’s the story of artists reckoning with their past while attempting to push the field and culture forward. It’s the story of vital tradition going through a deeply public existential crisis. It’s the story of a field clumsily reckoning with its own imperfections while trying to preserve the art form that allows for the creation of some of humanity’s most sublime and essential artistic statements. It’s the story of a field whose cultural relevance–strictly in terms of reach and impact–is low enough to threaten the survival of some of its most storied institutions. And it’s the story of a field whose most vital and beautiful works haven’t been written yet, a field whose best days are ahead of it.

Legacies is a multigenerational song cycle project created by The Living Earth Show with the Sleeping Giant Composers Collective designed to interrogate the responsibility we have to steward our own history, and how we fit into an organism much larger than one individual.

 The six members of the collective Sleeping Giant – Timo Andres, Christopher Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Andrew Norman, and Robert Honstein – are some of the most performed and commissioned living composers of their generation. These composers have accrued a bevy of professional accolades, including six Pulitzer Prizes nominations, several Grammy awards and a few Rome Prizes, but suffice to say: the story of classical music in this millennium would simply be incomplete without them.

As has been the tradition in our field for centuries, the composers continue the lineage they inherited from their teachers by building their own thriving composition studios at some of the most influential music schools in the United States.

In Legacies, each Sleeping Giant composer will write an art song for The Living Earth Show and vocalist Tanner Porter (scored for guitar, percussion, and vocals) loosely based around their own conception of legacy: where they come from, what they would tell their younger self, and where they fit into an organism so much larger than any one individual.

Crucially, each Sleeping Giant composer selected one of their former students to join them in writing a song for the project with the same prompt. These six vital emerging voices–Akshaya Tucker (a former student of Robert Honstein), Anuj Bhutani (who studied with Andrew Norman),  Christina George (who studied with Jacob Cooper), Rohan Chander (who studied with Ted Hearne), Nathaniel Parks (who studied with Christopher Cerrone), and Danny Castellanos (who studied with Timo Andres)--will join their former teachers in writing songs for the cycle.

These twelve songs, then, represent our best attempt to reckon with our own responsibility to steward our tradition. In the process, we strive to allow audiences to see and hear, in real time, how musical communities grow and how the lineage of our classical music tradition unfolds.

Built over two years in partnerships with the University of Texas at Austin, West Chester University, Mannes School of Music, and a variety of other institutions across the United States, Legacies activates musical communities spanning generations, geography, musical training, and background to tell the story of who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going.