The libretto, written by Phillips, chronicles a single Black mother and her son and uses additional text from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, author Isaac Butler, Abolitionist Frederick Douglas, and from Mothers of the Movement, founded in 2013 by Black mothers. and his ensemble Numinous with The Grey Land – a work about being Black in America. (2018), ' A Cockroach's Tarantella,' for string quartet, electronics, and narrator by Du Yun (2006/2019) and 'The Anchoress,' a monodrama by David Ludwig (2018.) Listen to portions of each of these long-form works. Hear three thoughtful musical tales featuring a woman’s voice: 'The Grey Land', a mono-opera by Joseph C. Their next performance is January 6, grab your ticket today. A live audio show and online listening series. Today’s episode is a collaboration with Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff of The World According to Sound. And then there’s Lionel Mapleson, the grandfather of bootlegging, who spent years recording the Metropolitan Opera from every possible vantage point. There are amateur home and field recordings, instructional tapes, and commercial music. We then visit with Thomas Edison and his phonograph invention, which etched sound into tinfoil. We hear one of the first recordings ever made, dated 1853. Archivists around the country have been digitizing thousands of old records, tinfoil, and wax cylinders that few people have ever heard. On January 1st, 2022 all audio recorded before 1923 is entering the public domain because of a new law, the Music Modernization Act. A journey back to the very beginning of recorded sound and the strange, random, beautiful things people captured more than a century ago.