Conducted by Mark Reid - REFUGE: music of resilience + hope Christ Church Cathedral, Vancouver, July 15th 2016 Solo: Heather Molloy arr. Missy Clarkson “Book of Days” opens, in colour, with 20th-century workmen blasting a brick wall, leaving a hole that opens into a black-and-white small town in the Middle Ages. Men, women and children glide about their daily tasks, stopping to answer sometimes tellingly anachronistic questions from 20th-century interviewers... The medieval Christians are dressed in white; the Jews are in black robes, each marked with a yellow circle. Both are stricken by the plague, for which the Jews are blamed. A Jewish girl has visionary dreams that prompt her to draw crude objects identifiable as a car, an airplane, a gun. At the end of ‘’Book of Days’’ the workmen enter the town and come across the drawings traced into a wall. Meredith Monk is an innovative American composer, famous for her interdisciplinary work and development of vocal technique. Her genre-stretching works “thrive at the intersection of music and movement, image and object, light and sound, discovering and weaving together new modes of perception... creating landscapes of sound that unearth feelings, energies, and memories for which there are no words.” Monk was recently recognized in 2015 when President Obama presented her with the National Medal of Arts.