Notes on the Program
Sunday, March 8 5:00 pm Trinity United Methodist Church 225 W. President Street Performance length approx. 60 minutes
Musicians of the Savannah Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus Mel Whitehead, conductor
World Premiere: Sympátheia by Martin Gendelman Performance time: Approx. 15 minutes Sympátheia, for voices, percussion, and electronics, is an abstract reflection on our modern interactions and the concepts of sympathetic resonance, deep listening, interconnectedness, and empathy. Our twentieth-first century world is a loud, noisy one. Information of all sorts lands in our ears and in front of our eyes all the time, every day, and the internet, with its far reaching possibilities, has become a major channel for social interactions. Perhaps its most significant advantage, the immediateness in the response, has also created a problem as there seems to be no time, in our modern interactions, for thoughtful communication. No time for reflecting on ideas of our own and others; not time for meditation. No time for listening. Really listening. Listening to others. Listening to ourselves. Sympátheia, a Latin word evolved from Greek, was the term used in Ancient Greece to describe several different phenomena. In the realm of Acoustics, the word described what we now know as “sympathetic resonance,” or how a vibratory body may respond to external vibrations. We normally use this concept in regards to sounds, but one could also think of it in relation to our current social interactions. Interestingly, the term was also used by the Stoic philosophers to describe a “belief in mutual interdependence among everything in the universe, that we are all one,” as Marcus Aurelius wrote in his personal reflections. And yet another meaning of the term evolved over the centuries to become what we know today as empathy.
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