When the World as You’ve Known it Doesn’t Exist (2020)

The outer sections of the piece explored fluid textures, with frequent glissandos and vocal ululations, juxtaposed with orchestral tutti. The middle section, a jazzy surprise, introduced a dyadic motive that was then put through a set of variations, including an extraordinary series of long trills near its end. The motive then joined the beginning material to cohere into a beguiling conclusion. Reid is an imaginative composer and excellent orchestrator. One hopes the BSO will commission and program more of her work. 

The concert began with a gorgeous piece by the much-admired young Ellen Reid, who won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for her opera prism. Her new piece, When the World as You’ve Known It Doesn’t Exist, was a world premiere, part of the Philharmonic’s Project 19, which has commissioned 19 women composers to honour the 19th Amendment, by which 100 years ago American women got the right to vote. Highly personal and not explicitly political, the 11-minute piece offers shimmering sonorities for a full orchestra and three vocalising women.

Ellen Reid’s When the World As You’ve Know It Doesn’t Exist is the third orchestral piece to be premiered as part of the New York Philharmonic's “Project 19” series of commissions by female composers in honor of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. She described it in pre-performance remarks as a reaction to our unsettled times, starting with disembodiment, dizziness and anger, but moving toward resonance and meaning. It was an entirely successful depiction, to my ears; in fact, it was one of the most evocative renditions of an emotional inner monologue I have heard from an orchestra in music from any century. The ten-minute piece is a succession of shifting and contrasting vignettes, each with the emotional clarity of good film music. Fragments of melody emerge from and retreat into nightmarish, lonely landscapes. Wordless sopranos soar over distorted ragtime rhythms. (Eliza Bagg, Martha Cluver and Estelí Gomez joined the Philharmonic). A huge orchestral descent shatters into shards that accumulate into an ostinato. A sweeping, emotional melody comes to dominate the final minutes. Notably, Reid is not afraid to thin her orchestra out: a passage for piccolo, accompanied only by tremolo cellos and suspended cymbal, is among my most vivid impressions of the piece.