SAMUEL GUARNACCIA, composition
CAMERON DAVIS, visual art
SAM GUARNACCIA, Composer
Samuel Guarnaccia, a Vermont native, studied classical guitar in Spain and has performed throughout parts of Europe and North America. He has taught and instituted programs at the University of Denver, Middlebury College, and the University of Vermont, as Spanish scholar, player/performer, and composer with deep ties to the history, struggle, traditions, art and spirituality of ancient and contemporary Indigenous peoples.
His cycle of nine Peace songs has been incorporated into a Peace education curriculum. His previous major work, A Celtic Mass for Peace, Songs for the Earth, has been performed all over the United States, Iona and Edinburgh, Scotland, and was featured in a major Peace celebration on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 on September 11, 2011, in New York, and in Vermont. His recent composition, the Emergent Universe Oratorio, is an hour and half long choral and chamber orchestra composition conceived in response to the current unfolding scientific cosmology as presented in the 2011 documentary Journey of the Universe, www.journeyoftheuniverse.org. The music, lyrics, and art will express this new story, evoking reverence and responsibility. At its root, the Emergent Universe Oratorio is a call to inspire humanity to participate in Earth’s transition from a genetically determined to a culturally determined story, reversing our present perilous course to embrace a mutually enhancing Earth-human relationship. This is a profoundly spiritual, as well as cultural, psychic, evolutionary process.
On June 30, 2017 the World Premiere of the Emergent Universe Oratorio will be preformed in Cleveland, Ohio at the Maltz Center for the Performing Arts, Case Western Reserve University. The BlueWater Chamber Orchestra and the Cleveland Chamber Choir will perform the work.
PAULA GUARNACCIA, Creative Partner / Producer
Paula Guarnaccia, M.Ed., has had a long career in higher education and healthcare administration. After retiring from the University of Vermont in May of 2010 as Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, she worked with the National Peace Academy as their Director of Administration and Finance, as a BePeace Teacher, and an educator with the Institute of HeartMath. In collaboration with her huband, composer Sam Guarnaccia, Paula is a key creative partner in the new Emergent Universe Oratorio Project. She is the Producer of the Cleveland World Premiere.
PETER AND CAITLIN ADAIR, Librettists
Peter and Caitlin Adair, evolutionary thinkers, artists, artisans of Earth and profound voices for the new cosmology in their calendar creations. Their home in Putney, Vermont was built as an alternative community school in 1975 and has been a private home since 1980. They moved there from Brattleboro, Vermont, in 2003 and began to create the fruit, vegetable, and flower gardens and to transform the house with color and even more windows. In two or three years, the place took on such a strong nurturing energy they decided to call it Sanctuary and to offer Sanctuary to others in various ways. Peter Adair is the creator of the Living Cosmos Calendar series.
JOHN ELDER, Librettist
John Elder, professor emeritus of English and American studies at Middlebury College, has taught at Bread Loaf since 1982 and served as on-site director in both Alaska and New Mexico. In addition to studies of Frost, ballads, and pastoral, his signature courses have involved writing, kayaking, or botanizing along the Long Trail from Vermont to Canada, through the fjords of Southeast Alaska, or in the Adirondack High Peaks, with students returning from the wilds dirty and tired but wholly exhilarated by the unique challenges of the course. An accomplished teacher, Elder, according to one student, “could teach the yellow pages and have people think it was among the best stuff they ever read.” Elder’s most recent books, Reading the Mountains of Home, The Frog Run, and Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa, combine memoir with discussion of literature and Vermont’s environmental history. As for his impression of Bread Loaf, he writes, “Both hiking on the Long Trail with a class and sitting in a seminar’s circle under the majestic Davidson Library spruces, teaching at Bread Loaf has always been a strenuous delight. I’m so grateful for this vivid learning community.”
DEEP TIME JOURNEY NETWORK, Fiscal Sponsor and Creative Partner
CAMERON DAVIS, Visual Artist
Cameron Davis is a Full Time Lecturer with the University of Vermont’s Department of Art and Art History, where she teaches painting and drawing. She is also an Adjunct Lecturer with the University of Vermont’s Environmental Program where she teaches interdisciplinary courses on art, ecology and community.
Davis’ paintings, installations, and community art projects, explore issues of the environment and living consciously at this Eaarth-time. Her work uses imagery taken from various sources: Hindu/yogic practices, Buddhism, Earth based traditions, and the new sciences, paired with abstraction that corresponds to the felt and sensed. In this way Davis attempts to form cultural frameworks that reweave relational and participatory ecological perspectives, attempting to convey that Earth’s compromise is our own interdependent compromise. Her Endless Spring series of paintings were created for the original performance of the Oratorio in September 2013 at the Breeding Farm of Shelburne Farms, Vermont.
Children's Peace Songs