DECODA ENSEMBLE

PROGRAM NOTES

Flight to the moon
No astronomers' dream
Not a physicists scheme
I take a flight to the moon
No laws apply

No mighty motors
launch me from my source
Engineers never chart my course
as I take to the moon

A flight to the moon
No researching to do
Minus science or crew
I take a flight to the moon
no laws apply

No one has planned
this journey so grand
I take into the blue
A flight to the moon
the moment I look at you

- Margaret Rages Boyd
Flight to the Moon

I strongly connected with a poem by Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz about her grandfather's hands from her 2021 book The Peace Chronicles. I started remembering my own grandfather's hands with their own markings from a life well-lived. Though I cannot hold his hands anymore, I am able to still hold the hands of my grandmother, who is coming 'round the bend towards 95 years gracing planet earth with her style, verve, and music.

A few weeks after deciding to create a work in response to Yolanda's poem, my grandmother asked me to write down a piece of music she had written in the 1950s as a love song for her aerospace engineer husband. I grew up among her compositions but this piece had never, to my memory, been shown to me before. And now I'm showing it to you. Something from the hands that made me, the hands that have existed as wrought, living, loving marbled porcelain for nearly a century. The hands that made this music yet never wrote it down, and the memory that kept it close for 70 years until it decided that the time was right to show it to me

I've taken Margaret's two minute Flight to the Moon and brought it into my world for this work. We collaborated similarly on my sister's wedding march, in which my grandmother remembered a little song she wrote as a young girl mimicking the cry of a bird on her aunt's dairy farm in rural Missouri during the Great Depression. However, Flight to the Moon is the first piece of weight we've collaborated on across time as two Boyd women in their 30s.

American culture was orb-obsessed in their mid-century pursuits towards the sky to put man on the moon. Fly Me to the Moon was written in 1954, and my grandfather helped in his own small way, working for Boeing and Bendix, my grandmother dutifully in tow as his job made him move their young family several times around the country. I see Margaret's Flight to the Moon alongside Bart Howard's Fly Me to the Moon as a parallel take on this time. Here, we see her small defiances, perhaps the distilled frustrations of an artist whose deliberately un-technological livelihood was paid for by the space race. Ever practical, my grandmother much preferred a "flight into the blue" of my grandfather's bright blue eyes, and ever the obstruperous protest artist in her own right, I think that's where this song erupted from.

About the Artists

Decoda was founded in 2012 by musicians who first collaborated as members of Ensemble Connect, a two-year fellowship program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute in partnership with the NYC Department of Education. Its work as an ensemble has grown out of this collective training, which focused on developing skills as exemplary performers, dedicated teachers, and passionate advocates for music in communities around the world. 

Decoda’s versatile musicians are equally committed to virtuosic performance and audience engagement. Its flexible instrumentation, from trios to large mixed ensemble, allows for unique, inspiring and engaging concert experiences for a vast array of audiences, from concert halls to schools, hospitals, and correctional facilities. As alumni of Ensemble Connect and in recognition of its members’ ongoing success as artists, educators, and advocates for music, Decoda is the only independent ensemble to be recognized as an affiliate ensemble of Carnegie Hall. 

About the Composer

Michigan-born, Manhattan-based American composer Stephanie Ann Boyd (b. 1990) writes melodic music about women’s memoirs and the natural world for symphonic and chamber ensembles. Her work has been performed in nearly all 50 states and has been commissioned by musicians and organizations in 37 countries. Boyd’s five ballets include works choreographed by New York City Ballet principal dancers Lauren Lovette, Ashley Bouder, NYCB soloist Peter Walker, and XAOC Contemporary Ballet’s Eryn Renee Young. Eero, a ballet commissioned by Access Contemporary Music and Open House New York, was written for the grand opening of the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport. Stephanie’s music has been praised as “a racing, brassy score” (New York Times), “attractive lyricism” (Gramophone), “[with] ethereal dissonances” (Boston Globe), “[music that] didn’t let itself be eclipsed” (Texas Classical Review), “arrestingly poetic” (BMOP), and “wide ranging, imaginative” (Portland Press Herald). 

Boyd is the 2021/2022 Peoria Symphony Orchestra Composer in Residence, a position culminating in an entire concert of her works, including her violin concerto Sybil, her cantata Sheltering Voices, and a new work inspired by Betty Friedan entitled Everywoman, with Deborah Rutter, Michelle DeYoung, and Sirena Huang as soloists. The 2021/2022 season also includes the premiere of Julia Louisa Esther: a Suffragette Symphony with the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Christopher Dragon; Alleluia Olora commissioned by Astral Artists for cellist Tommy Mesa; Aurora, commissioned by the Kurganov-Finehouse Duo, and others. 

Boyd’s music has been commissioned and performed by concertmasters of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Singapore Symphony, the New York City Ballet Orchestra, the Des Moines Symphony, the Faroe Islands Symphony, the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra, the Fort Smith Symphony, the Arkansas Philharmonic Orchestra, and principal players in the Colorado Symphony Orchestra.  Her music has been commissioned and/or played by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the New England Conservatory Philharmonic, the Cape Cod Chamber Orchestra, the New York Jazzharmonic, the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, the Roosevelt University Orchestra, the Eureka Ensemble, the JVL Festival Orchestra, the Texas State University Symphony, the Cremona International Academy Orchestra, the UW La Crosse Symphony, the Detroit Civic Orchestra, and the El Paso Youth Symphony. Her work has been presented by the Thalia and her Sisters concert series, the Moirae Ensemble, and Sandcastle New Music in New York City; Æpex Contemporary Music in Michigan; Juventas New Music, Collage New Music, and the New Gallery Concert Series in Boston; Cincinnati Soundbox, and others. Stephanie has worked with conductors such as Andrew Litton, Lina Gonzales, Earl Lee, Nathan Aspinall, Cliff Colnot, Gill Rose, Julian Benichou, Kristo Kondakci, and Kevin Fitzgerald.

stephanieannboyd.com