Grammy-award winning vocal ensemble Conspirare returns to its festival roots with March Moderns. Join them for concerts where world-class singing meets the music of today’s boldest and most influential composers. Get your tickets today for a week that will captivate and inspire!

March Moderns concerts will take listeners on a week-long musical journey with by national and global voices from the United States to Iceland to Afghanistan.  Selections explore relevant topics of freedom, equality, love, and the human condition. March Moderns includes an incredible roster of singers, instrumentalists, and poets; world and regional premieres; and insightful pre-concert talks before each performance.

Songs for Muska by Jocelyn Hagen (2017-2018 American Prize winner) masterfully unites music and poetry written by young Afghan women and is scored for choir, violin, cello, and harp. Hagen’s musical textures and colors sing in the settings of landays (2-line Pashto folk poems) translated by Eliza Griswold in I Am the Beggar of the World and Farzana Marie’s translations of poems by young Afghan women collected in Load Poems Like Guns.  

Afghani poet Somaia Ramesh, author of “Load Poems Like Guns,” “For Nadia,” and  “And the Word Null” (all set in Songs for Muska)  and poet/translator Farzana Marie will join us for the performance. All the poems are included in Load Poems Like Guns.  Hagen also drew on landays collected in Eliza Griswold’s I am the Beggar of the World.