Apollo Chamber Players will dive deeper into its season-long story of “Silenced Voices” with composer, multimedia artist and writer Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky), whose work immerses audiences in a blend of genres, global culture and environmental issues. Spanning multiple eras, Apollo’s concert delves into the history of forbidden theories in science and astronomy to the present-day warnings of climatologists and the relevancy of George Orwell’s 1984 with Canceled. The multisensory concert takes place at 8 p.m., Saturday, November 18 at the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s Burke Baker Planetarium.
Apollo Founder Matthew Detrick shared what he was thinking when assembling this program.
“What really struck me was the cancellation of Copernicus, Galileo and other noteworthy astronomers and scientists who were challenging the notions of how our world and universe works,” Detrick said. “It was considered heresy, what they were talking about, and I think the interesting thing is only in the 19th century did the church finally say, ‘Oh, we’re sorry. You happen to be right. The Earth does revolve around the sun.’”
Score one for the scientific method, even if late to the party.
Cancelation for unpopular beliefs or going against the grain isn’t anything new. For example, how heated can people become over putting pineapple on a pizza or adding beans in chili? Now, imagine extrapolating that fervor into something like religious beliefs or the universe’s order.
“It’s ridiculous when you think about it, and that’s where the Enlightenment comes into the foray,” Detrick said. “The Enlightenment is the reason why we have democracy, why we have the country that we have, why we have the world that we have. That’s putting faith in the human condition and human reason.”
To elevate the concert, Apollo Chamber Players invited DJ Spooky to provide a multisensory element, including visual and audio elements that guarantee to impress.
He brings his own list of qualifications.
DJ Spooky, a composer, multimedia artist and writer, is currently Artist in Residence at Yale University Center for Collaborative Arts and Media. He has collaborated with an array of recording artists, including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Metallica, Chuck D from Public Enemy, Steve Reich and Yoko Ono amongst many others. He was named National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2014, and his artwork has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, The Venice Biennial for Architecture, the Miami/Art Basel fair and many other museums and galleries.
For the concert, Apollo and DJ Spooky will feature portions of his Arctic Rhythms project and music and then also dovetail with George Orwell in 1984.
To complete the Arctic Rhythms project, DJ Spooky traveled to the arctic and captured the sounds of the area, where he then translated the experience into various forms of data. He says 1984 and his experience in the arctic share a similar bond.
“Both have a common thread, which is data. What you’ll be hearing on one hand with Arctic Rhythms is a distillation of the climate data that I was looking at when I was working on a series of projects that I like to call acoustic portraits,” DJ Spooky said. “When I say a ‘portrait,’ you usually think of a painting or sculpture, but as a composer and artist, it’s incredibly important to think of a sound is a dimension and realization of ideas.”
To complete his initial project, DJ Spooky wrote a series of projects looking at the rhythms and tempos that are being disrupted by climate change because the planet and weather, as he observes, is a pattern.
“Let’s think of that as a sound overlay. And how do we get sound? We play with computers. That’s what we do these days,” he said.
The Orwell project (1984) is a meditation, “regretfully with melancholy,” he added.
“It’s eerily accurate,” he said. “There’s a level of misinformation, computational propaganda, and other issues that think about the way that contemporary memory and the contemporary sense of how we tell stories to one another has been hijacked by algorithms, misinformation and so on. 1984 is kind of a touchstone as a cautionary tale.”
Detrick agrees, which is why he included this programming in the season.
“[1984 is] still so relevant, even more so to today’s society, in the context of censorship and book bans,” Detrick said.
Seating is limited, so buy run (don’t walk) to buy tickets.
Apollo Chamber Players will present ‘Canceled’ at 8 p.m. on Saturday, November 18 at the Museum of Natural Science, 5555 Hermann Park. For tickets or information, visit apollochamberplayers.org. $10 – 40.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
