Steven Mackey (b. 1956) is a GRAMMY-winning composer of works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance, and opera, and winner of several awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. Bright in coloring, ecstatic in inventiveness, lively and profound, Mackey’s music spins the tendrils of his improvisatory riffs into large-scale works of dramatic coherence.

Memoir is a 75-minute music/theatrical work for narrator, string quartet and percussion duo based on the unpublished memoir written by Mackey’s mother, Elaine Mackey. The narrative incorporates vocal texts, personal photos, video projections – the influences range from Stravinsky and Schoenberg to direct contributions from the Dover Quartet and vocalist Natalie Chista Rakes. Rakes’s voice embodies the character of Elaine, Mackey’s mother, an ordinary woman whose extraordinary life reflects the tensions of 20th Century existence. Memoir’s text serves Rakes as her “orchestral” part. Elaine recounts her experience of The Great Depression, WW II, along with personal battles with anxiety, divorce, and alcoholism.

Mackey writes: “Other strategies for melding my music and my mother’s words include the use of diagetic music – music that exists in the scene – and music that imitates the sound of the scene – trains, mimeograph machines, clinking glasses, car horns, etc. For example, the glorious cacophony of a casino floor in Reno Nevada is the backdrop to a scene in my mother’s story but also has the kind of abstract sonic image . . . that can easily find a home in my music.”