Jazz Coalition presents: Fay Victor – “Sirens & Silences"

The city went into lockdown or ‘pause’ on March 20, 2020, New Yorkers did what we always do - we hunkered down for the common good. Some fled the city but most of us stayed inside to stem the tide of this new NEW malaise that swooped in and found many of us helpless. We stayed inside. Many of us died. So the quiet was deafening, punctuated for days only by the sound of sirens. Far and near. On repeat. 

As a composer, I’m thinking a lot about recreating memory through sound from a place of actuality. In other words these tones are really what I heard during that time and space. 

What we all heard as the players also lived through this time in the city.  Sirens & Silences aims to portray this sonic environment and the mood of this specific time for New York City, when it sounded like a place that didn’t exist in the same space before. As a lifelong New Yorker, I never heard the city sound the way it did then. Let these sounds be a reminder of what was and what should never be again.