Construction After Mehretu
For choir and cellophane.
Julie Mehretu’s giant murals address urban landscapes and their histories, combining layers of architectural line-drawings, highly gestural illustrations, and abstract colors, shapes, and textures. The result is a dense and dynamic world rich with movement (somehow) and meaning to be mined. This structure functions as a kind of grammar and the varied individual elements as vocabulary. She has said, "I think of my abstract mark-making as a type of sign lexicon, signifier, or language for characters that hold identity and have social agency."
Construction is not a "translation" of any one of her works, but rather an attempt to utilize the visual language she has developed. In this piece, the content is pre-determined and the large-scale structure established by the composer, but the ordering, combination, and treatment of that content, those building blocks, are largely determined by the singers and conductor. The goal is a sort of auditory, multi-layered mobile set in motion by the place, time, and ensemble makeup involved in any given performance and an exploration of the myriad relationships and structures (and the resultant implications) possible inside a closed environment with a specific and limited vocabulary.
All the text is drawn, in small pieces, from various books and articles about Mehretu and her work.
Commissioned but never performed by the Santa Clarita Master Chorale in 2016. Premiered in 2018 by C3LA.
trio
Excerpt from Trio for three female voices, fabric, and stairs.
Composed for and performed in the Mark Taper Courtyard as part of the Picnic 51 outdoor festival.
Composed by Amy Golden 2016
a dream play
Original music, sound design, and vocal coaching for August Strindberg’s A Dream Play.
Composed by Amy Golden 2015