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World Premiere of Hannah Lash's The Voynich Symphony with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra

May. 01, 2017

World Premiere of Hannah Lash's <em>The Voynich Symphony</em> with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra

On May 4, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra presents the world premiere of Hannah Lash’s large-scale symphonic work The Voynich Symphony, written throughout her two-year residency with the orchestra. William Boughton leads the orchestra at Woolsey Hall in New Haven, Connecticut.

Each movement of The Voynich Symphony details a different aspect of the mysterious Voynich manuscripts: Herbal, Astronomical, Biological and Cosmological. The manuscript, housed at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, is an illustrated codex in an unknown writing system that continues to puzzle cryptographers to this day. Lash set out to capture the manuscript’s vibrant and enigmatic qualities in musical form, drawing on themes from botany and cosmology, encompassing the growth of plant life and the motion of planets and stars. Lash’s compositional process has been documented in writings and video blogs as part of the Lash-Voynich Project.


(a page from the Voynich manuscript, held at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

Also this month, the Calidore String Quartet will perform the world premiere of Lash’s new string quartet How to Remember Seeds on May 14 as part of the Schneider Concerts at The New School in New York City, and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn performs her chamber orchestra work This Ease on May 20 at St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, New York.

View the score for This Ease:


For more information on Hannah Lash, visit schott-music.com.

Hannah Lash
The Voynich Symphony (2017)
for orchestra
2(2.pic).2.2.2-4.2.2.1-timp.2perc(b.d, cym, xyl, vib)-hp-str
40’ 

How to Remember Seeds (2017)
for string quartet
12’ 

This Ease (2014)
for chamber orchestra
2.2.2.2-1.1 in C.0.0-timp.3perc-hp-str
15’