The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's Liquid Music Series presents Brian Harnetty’s Shawnee, Ohio, a work which critically engages ecology, energy, place and personal history. Known for his ability to “bring gem recordings up out of the basement and into the light” (New Music Box), Harnetty derives his compositional material from the sounds of production and Appalachian town life, reflecting the experience of a town fighting to survive after a century of economic decline and environmental degradation. The town’s downturn and partial restoration act as an ethos of the struggles and hopes of the larger region, now immersed in a controversial fracking boom. Shawnee, Ohio considers these histories, evokes place through sound, and listens to the present alongside traces of the past.
