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| Apollo Chamber Players Releases New Album, BAN: Stories of Censorship Chamber Music America's 2025 Ensemble of the Year Apollo Chamber Players releases their eighth commercial album, BAN: Stories of Censorship, as a digital release on Azica Records, with a physical CD and special edition vinyl release to follow on September 5, 2025. Through Apollo commissions from a kaleidoscopic array of today's composers, Apollo reflects on the threat of censorship, drawing from multiple cultures and historical episodes in this musically vibrant call to cherish and defend our freedom of expression. Legendary actor, author, and activist George Takei performs as narrator in composer Marty Regan's The Book of Names, delivering a powerful account of his personal journey and life of activism following his family's experience in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II. Through his inspired, timely plea for the preservation of American democracy, Takei's story offers a stark reminder that even our most basic rights must never be taken for granted. The album also features works by Emmy Award–winning composer Jasmine Barnes in collaboration with Houston Poet Laureate Emeritus Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, Houston-based composer Mark Buller, Turkish-American composer Erberk Eryilmaz, Afrofuturist flutist/composer Allison Loggins-Hull, electronic and experimental hip-hop artist Paul Miller (AKA DJ Spooky), and Afghan-born composer and rubab performer Homayoun Sakhi. "BAN: Stories of Censorship is Apollo Chamber Players' bold musical response to rising global threats against freedom of expression, " said Apollo founder and Director Matthew J. Detrick. "Featuring new commissions by composers from politically embattled regions—including Afghanistan, Turkey, and the U.S.—the album amplifies voices often silenced. In connective harmony, these works form a musical call to conscience, reminding us that in dark times, art is both resistance and refuge." In the opening track, Marty Regan's The Book of Names, the composer draws inspiration from a comprehensive list compiled in 2022 of every person incarcerated in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. As a young child, narrator George Takei was one of the thousands confined to the camps, along with his brother, sister, and parents. In this adapted version of the work, originally premiered by Apollo Chamber Players in February 2024, Takei's story is set to Regan's stirring composition as he recounts the example set forth by his parents, who had, in Takei's words, "lived through the darkest breakdown of our democracy" – yet responded not with bitterness but by teaching their children the importance of participation in a participatory democracy. The climax of the piece invokes Takei's impassioned testimony to Congress in 1981, urging restitution, with the names of imprisoned Japanese-Americans spoken by the performers in cacophonous solidarity – ending on a note of profound dignity as Takei recites his family's names, and his own. The Book of Names concludes with Takei's hopeful wisdom: "Our democracy is a precious ideal that requires all of us, as Americans, to actively engage with it to keep it strong and true and shining." See photos of Takei in recording sessions with Apollo Chamber Players at Houston's Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. In the album's title work, BAN, composed for flute/piccolo/stomp box and string quartet, Allison Loggins-Hull takes direct aim at the rising volume of books challenged or removed from library shelves. Often targeting stories about people of color or LGBTQ individuals – while being defended on accusations of pornographic content or indecency – these bans affected more than 1, 400 books spanning 874 unique titles during the 2022-2023 school year, according to PEN America's Index of School Book Bans. The work incorporates digital stomp box samples of the sounds of banned books being slammed, depicting the exponential pile-up of narratives under censorship. "Throughout BAN, musical voices are strained and forced into silence, representing the overwhelming number of marginalized stories being shelved, " writes Loggins-Hull, who performs on this track on flute, piccolo, and stomp box. Mark Buller's work Firewall, premiered as part of Apollo's thematic Silenced Voices series during the 2023-2024 season, draws themes from seminal novels highlighting provocative themes, deriving its title from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, on the burning of books. The four-movement composition develops around four additional works of fiction, in turn reflecting the search for meaning in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, the brutal realities of war in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, the evolution of conscience in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and the topsy-turvy blend of high spirits and darker undercurrents in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In Jasmine Barnes' and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton's work Revise?, also commissioned for the Silenced Voices series, the composer/librettist duo sounds the alarm on the erasure of African-American voices through revisionist history and literature. Composed for spoken word poet, choir, and string quartet, the work weaves together text from social commentary and current events, along with a call to acknowledge and resist this erasure, regrouping and restrategizing as the Black community has traditionally strived to do in the face of repression. "My goal in this piece was to create a sound world that supports the text, but also includes many influences of African American art forms, from spirituals to West African rhythms to hip-hop, " Barnes commented. "In a way, this piece is much like Black history of today, in which we discuss the topics that are being erased, to continue the presence of the past, replenishing what is erased and revised." A third work from the Silenced Voices series, Homayoun Sakhi's Arman, takes its name from the Persian and Pashto word for "hope." Sakhi, a noted performer on the lute-like rubab of Central and South Asian origin, is featured on this commission with long-time collaborator Rajvinder Singh, one of India's premier tabla performers. In this musical reflection on war and turmoil in Afghanistan, the composer manifests hope as a touchstone for perseverance and renewal in the face of suffering, incorporating multiple styles of Afghan traditional music in a contemporary, Western context. In Quantopia/The Thought Police, composer Paul Miller (AKA DJ Spooky) creates a "dialogue across time, " linking author George Orwell's writing on totalitarian oppression with events in the present day. Through a multicultural collage of genres and influences, the composer creates what he calls "my sonic response to the age of 'Post-Truth', " highlighting the pernicious effects of "fake news" and the social media algorithms that too often amplify it. "Orwell's 1984 isn't fiction anymore—it's a mirror, " he comments. "Fake news spreads faster than facts, and the Thought Police feel less like dystopia and more like daily life. With Apollo Chamber Players, I've crafted this meditation on resistance—a moving anthem for minds that refuse to be controlled. This is music for a world fighting to remember what truth sounds like." In the album’s final track, Sis Çani / Fog Bell, Turkish-born composer Erberk Eryilmaz grapples with censorship on both personal and global levels, tracing its effects in his birth country of Turkey, his adopted home in the United States, and worldwide. The “fog bell” of the title becomes the composer’s metaphor for the role of artists as warning beacons, standing boldly and courageously against authoritarianism and censorship – as referenced by the Turkish poet Melih Cevdet Anday, who wrote of an artist’s “duty to persist, to write, to play, and to guide society, like a fog bell cutting through the mist.” Also referenced in the work is Turkish statesman Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who said in an address to the Turkish people: “When it is time to fulfill your duty, you will not consider the circumstances or limitations surrounding you.” The composer himself comments: “We are living in turbulent times across the world. In such moments, I believe music becomes even more important. A crucial part of our role as artists is to persevere.” write your comments about the article :: © 2025 Jazz News :: home page |