“Stay courageous, fearless, strong, directed, supportive, sympathetic, resilient, patient, tolerant and kept my sense of humor!” responded an unnamed individual to an online invitation offered by the LOTUS Project, a Trenton-based organization that is having its debut on Saturday, January 22, at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral at 205 West State Street.
The event will also premiere a new sound work incorporating the above line and those more than 30 others by people who followed the online thread that said “2020 was a ‘silent’ year for many. What’s your story? Complete the following sentence and become a part of our first concert! ‘During The Silence, I . . .’”
In addition to the opening statement, other responses filling the empty space included, “I heard myself,” “Saw the hurt that ended up shaping me,” and “Struggled with meeting needs of my family, yet discovered a new passion in creativity which delivered me from darkness.”
“During COVID we experienced something once in a lifetime,” says the Westminster Choir College trained professional musician and LOTUS Project artistic director Alicia Brozovich. “We need to acknowledge it.”
Brozovich says the nonprofit group was founded in November, 2020, when she and a number of her colleagues were out of work and looking toward the future.
“Perhaps it is crazy,” she says about founding a new organization while others were challenged and closing, “but we thought the pandemic was a way of looking at the future. We’re an intentional organization. Our mission is to craft immersive musical experiences in which we can encounter the world with new eyes and a renewed sense of wonder.”
The Trenton resident and administrator with the Trenton Children’s Chorus says the name is also intentional and points to the lotus flower’s journey through darkness and mud to the surface of a body of water, where it dies to begin again.
“It has deep personal significance,” she says. “That’s the human experience. We’re challenged, grow, and then fall back. We can’t grow without challenge. And art reflects that experience.”
The decision to spell the group’s name in capital letters is based on the idea of community inclusion and growth. “We want to curate concert experiences that engage with audiences where they become part of the experience,” she says.
The approach is outlined in the group’s mission statement that calls for “immersive concerts” in non-traditional performance venues, uses compelling stories about shared human experiences, highlights “historically excluded voices,” and engages in partnerships with the local community.
While the language for the organization’s vision was inspired in part by an approach by the New York Theater Ensemble, Brozovich says the spark for the organization was a Trenton experience and points to the occasion when she and other Westminster-trained LOTUS founders participated in the “Anthracite Fields” production in Trenton in 2017.
Contemporary American composer Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio based on the words of Pennsylvania coal miners was produced by Westminster Choir College at the Roebling Wire Works building.
“There are a number of people from Westminster,” she says about the group’s core. “(But) we’ve been prioritizing people who appreciate what Trenton is. They need to love Trenton, people who live and work in Trenton.
“We’re not here to fix Trenton. We’re here to join an art scene and help it come to life,” she says, noting that for the first presentation they’ll be working with the James Halsey Foundation’s young filmmakers project and engage Trenton visual artist Tamara Torres.
Brozovich may have put down roots in Trenton, but she was raised in Conway Springs, Kansas, 30 miles south of Wichita.
In a 2019 interview for U.S. 1 Newspaper, music writer and WWFM radio host Ross Amico says Brozovich’s “passion for music brought her to Westminster Choir College to pursue a master’s degree in choral conducting in 2013. Following her graduation, she joined the faculty of Westminster Conservatory.”
He notes that Brozovich was a Westminster conductor fellow who has led choirs from the Midwest to Florence, Italy, and Oxford, and assisted in collaborations with the Juilliard Orchestra, Juilliard415, and members of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra.
She also serves as assistant conductor for New York’s Urban Playground Chamber Orchestra and directs the adult choir at St. James Roman Catholic Church in Pennington.
As a soprano, she performs regularly with the Philadelphia Symphony Chorus and has performed with the Westminster Choir at Carnegie Hall and participated in musical events at the Boston Early Music Festival, Spoleto Festival in South Carolina, and the World Symposium on Choral Music in Spain.
Her husband, Colton Martin, is a pianist and the organist and full-time director of sacred music at the Roman Catholic parish of St. Dominic in Brick. The couple married after they completed the graduate program together at Westminster.
They live in Trenton’s Hiltonia section with their three-year-old son.
“It’s still a work in progress,” Brozovich says of the upcoming concert. “We’re trying to do more than stand up and sing.”
Referring to the uncertainty of creating a production and abstraction in the mission statement, Brozovich says, “It’s vague because we don’t want to limit ourselves. We need time to figure things out.”
That includes combining the January 22 self-generated Trenton sound work with an American premiere by contemporary English composer Paul-Dominic de Grande and other works.
Brozovich discovered de Grande’s “Let Me Up Out Here” by chance on YouTube and felt it reflected the mood of LOTUS’s debut.
Although the 12-minute piece has little text and uses German and Latin texts, Brozovich says she was attracted by the phrase that expressed the unifying sentiment of “one baptism” and the work’s sound that suggested the movement of water.
Brozovich says she contacted the composer, who while known for concert and church music was cited by the English newspaper The Observer as “a talented composer sure to inherit the mantle of best score-writer in British television.”
De Grande says the work “was the result of combining different sections from previous compositions, namely: a mass, an art project, a piano-solo and a piano-quintet. It’s what I call a ‘Frankenstein piece,’ a process around which new compositional bridges can spring and sometimes become sections in their own right. Incidentally, by taking out and reworking one of these sections I have been developing a new pop-song, so this process is not necessarily one merely of addition. I have a fondness for this piece because it constitutes various versions of myself in one, and they all seem to be getting along.
“As for the instrumentation, I am a great admirer of the saxophonist: Branford Marsalis, and I wanted to have something of the shimmering-richness of his tone in the piece. The oboe always seems to have one foot in the past and for me conjures up a sense of timelessness. The harp sounds like a liberated and romantic piano, and its soft and sometimes bracing reverberation was an ideal candidate to form the foundation of the piece. Finally, the sound of the voice is the most wonderful sound in the world, for me it is the apex-synthesis of communication and mystery.”
Excited about having an American premier of the work, the composer says in a recent email that “music has kept me going through this strange year, that it can travel so far and so quickly around the world is so wonderful.”
“The best way to describe the concert is that it’s a concept concert,” says Brozovich, who adds that since the group “believes art is for everyone, our ticket model is pay-what-you-want.”
Yet, she says, the group is suggesting a $25 donation, the price of a normal concert ticket, for those who can afford it, and notes that LOTUS has raised its targeted $20,000 in a Go Fund Me campaign.
“It’s a model that makes sense for the city and supports the idea that we’re trying to get though life together,” she says.
Out of Silence, Trinity Cathedral, 205 West State Street, Trenton. Saturday, January 22, 7 p.m. Free ($25 donation requested).
LOTUS’ second presentation, “Rach ‘All Night,’” featuring 20th century Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “All Night Vigil” is set for Sunday, February 27, 3:30 p.m., at St. Mary’s Assumption (Byzantine) Church, 333 Adeline Street, Trenton. www.thelotusprojectnj.org
Artist Tamara Torres — seen here with her painting ‘Silent Enough to Listen to Fragments of Your Soul’ — has lent her creative eye to the LOTUS Project’s debut presentation.,
