Clark Art Institute

Rome was one of the greatest civilizations in the world; yet, like all empires, it fell. Why, and how? The story is a mixture of politics, betrayal, immigration, religion, climate, pandemic, natural disaster, xenophobia, and bad luck (in short, everything human, and everything we face today). Rome is Falling, an opera composed by American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*) member Doug Balliett, is a zany lesson on the absurdity of what can happen when powerful people lose power. In his ever-prescient, ever-joyful way, Balliett brings audiences of all ages on a musical journey through a world that includes lollipops, a ridiculous number of characters, and an emperor with a chicken fetish.

This special program features Luigi Nono’s “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura” (1988-89), a richly theatrical, spatialized composition for violin and electronics, which is a particularly apt meditation for our time. Staged especially for the breathtaking encounter of landscape and architecture that is the Clark campus, this thought-provoking work explores the question “how do we move forward when no path seems to exist?”⁠

AMOC* returns, after last summer’s campus-wide extravaganza, to the Clark Art Institute for another afternoon of free, epic performances across the museum’s bucolic grounds.