In ‘Shelter,’ three of the most influential composers of our time, Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, explore the vulnerability we all share: the longing for a place where we can breathe, hide, disappear, or start anew. No two houses are the same, but the need for it is universal.

Since their collaboration on Bang on a Can, the three composers have developed a musical language that is pulsating, raw, and movingly honest. In Shelter, that language covers the full spectrum of feeling: from whisperingly small and intimate to music that resonates in your chest with rocking intensity.

Shelter is not a story about a building but a story about ourselves. About the tension between certainty and uncertainty, between protection and loneliness, between what we hold onto and what can blow away. 

Librettist Deborah Artman expresses this in images that are both comforting and fragile: the promise of a window, the tension in a beam, the blue lines of a design that reveals more than it hides. Her words touch that soft place we all know, where fear and hope whisper together.

For this new production, visual artist Johannes Offerhaus creates a kinetic installation that literally moves with the ensemble. His textile sculpture (growing, shrinking, breathing) is like a body that encloses us and then releases us. A temporary refuge that protects as often as it questions. His work amplifies the sensory experience in which space, skin, and music become one; in which shelter is something that arises, disappears, and must be sought again.

About the composers and their awards:

• Julia Wolfe received, among other awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Music (2015) for her oratorio Anthracite Fields. She was also named a MacArthur Fellow (2016) and has received numerous other awards.
• David Lang received the Pulitzer Prize in Music (2008) for The Little Match Girl Passion. He also won a Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance (2010) and was named Composer of the Year by Musical America (2013).
• Michael Gordon has received numerous awards, including a Grant to Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and recognition from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.