Mountains of the Moon project is a journey of finding your way through legendary maps, discovering the true cartography and busting the myth of the source of the Nile as propagated by Classical explorers and great thinkers of the time through Classical and Electronica music.

 

The legend of the Mountains of the Moon that was created by Ptolemy, the Roman Mathematician, is an erasure of history, by inventing a truth, replicating that truth as a source of knowledge and distributing this truth as fact. A traveling merchant said he found the source of the Nile, Mountains of the Moon and Ptolemy took this man’s account as truth and gave it legitimacy. When in fact the source begins with the Blue and White Nile coming together to form the Nile.

 

Artists Amanda Van Story Lewis and Christiane Dolores will experiment with classical and modern, with traditional form and improvisation. Opera and Electronica will overlap, split and become one, in many ways, like the Nile. The traditional pieces, Der Erlkonig and Recueillement, were chosen for their dramatic polemic style and mood.

 

There is an artistic mutual stretching for both artists as they move beyond the confines of the truth that has been imposed upon them. The myth that black women don’t have the right to express themselves using these musical forms, let alone to bring them together, therefore breaking rules, the myth and lie of racial and gender inferiority, that were wrongly imposed. Today in America, we are experiencing our own Mountains of the Moon and it is up to us to uncover the source of the truth.

 

Tonight’s performance is a collaboration with Alia Musica, featuring guest Bassist, Zoltan Weslowski.

Performed as part of the Pittsburgh Festival of New Music