Over 80 musicians comprised primarily of MIT Wind Ensemble (course 21M.426) students and MITWE alumni from across the globe, came together over the past months to produce a unique virtual performance of Jamshied Sharifi’s ’83, To The Light, To The Flame, conducted by Fred Harris. The piece premiered at MIT’s 2020 Commencement, May 29, 2020. The film was directed and edited by Jean Dunoyer of MIT’s Video Productions, Larry Gallagher, Executive Producer, and the audio was mixed and mastered by Jamshied Sharifi.
Using MITWE’s 2016 live, emotionally charged performance of the piece as a guide, musicians recorded themselves remotely, many for the first time, uploading 115 individual audio tracks, which Sharifi assembled. “Although I’ve worked on many recordings which involved musicians sending tracks recorded remotely,” noted Sharifi, “I’ve never seen or experienced anything close to this scale and complexity. It is a testament to our students that they met this challenge and did such a phenomenal job.”
With the simple instructions to “represent yourselves as you wish,” Jean Dunoyer provided guidance on filming, ultimately receiving 70 video files that he gracefully assembled to bring a visual story to Sharifi’s composition, among the most labor intensive but artistically satisfying such projects Dunoyer has ever undertaken. “The setting and choices the students made were so creative and inspiring to me,” he said.
Of the piece, Sharifi offers the following:
I wrote “To The Light, To The Flame” in 2015, as a response to the loss of two friends, both around my age, both unexpected losses. It is a meditation on the fragility of our lives, on the paradoxical sense of them being both long and brief, and on the need and wish and desire to live presently, fully, and with intention. It was a gift to the M.I.T. Wind Ensemble and to Fred Harris, and it gives me great pleasure that it has found a place in this time of loss and uncertainty. While writing the piece I came back several times to Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” (see below). It was in some way a guide to the composition. I wish the M.I.T Class of 2020 the best at this threshold in their lives.
The virtual performance includes alumni ranging from Class of 1996 to Class of 2020, current first year students though seniors, and members of the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble. “It’s very moving for me personally to have students represented from my entire time at MIT,” offered Harris. “Their brilliance as artists and scientists/engineers remains ever inspiring to me. This project—and the past eleven weeks—has been a testament to the need of community and the power of large ensemble communal music making.”
As with many MIT Music and Theater Arts and MIT Video Production collaborations, this work was funded in part through the generosity of Neil and Jane Pappalardo in collaboration with MIT’s Commencement Committee.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver (1935–2019)