Anansi and the Great Light (2019) 30'
For soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, children’s choir, oboe(=Ehn), Clarinet(=B.Cl), violin, viola, and bass.
Commissioned by Curtis’ Family Concert Series. Premiered 3/30/19 and 3/31/19 at Girard College and the Curtis Institute of Music. Self-published (Morningside Press, ASCAP).
Anansi and the Great Light, produced by The Curtis Institute of Music’s Family Concert Series, explored a new model for community involvement in the creative process. As the composer of the opera and a Community Artist Fellow at Curtis, Nick designed a series of residency workshops that involved students at Girard College in North Philadelphia in every phase of the work’s creation. Girard students directly contributed to the libretto and to the score for Anansi through fun, interactive activities. High school students at Girard designed and created the set for the opera, and elementary school students experienced the opera firsthand, performing as a children’s choir in the role of Nyame, the god of all things. Nick detailed the collaborative creative process for this opera in an article for Curtis’ magazine, Overtones. If you’d like to read more, watch the PBS special about the making of the opera, and see the interactive pre-concert experience for the opera, explore the top of Nick’s Projects page.
Synopsis:
Esi and Afia, daughters of Anansi the Spider, worked together to save their father from an unfortunate mishap. Anansi wants to reward the daughter who saved him; only he can’t decide which one was more heroic than the other. The god of all things, Nyame, tries to help Anansi see that his daughters saved him through teamwork and should share the prize; the great light. As Anansi and his daughters argue about who deserves the light, Nyame decides that none of them deserve it since they cannot see the value of sharing. Nyame takes the light to live in the sky for all the world’s creatures to remember how important it is to share. This great light in the sky is the one we call moon.
-Kanika Ambrose, librettist
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