Experience the New York premiere of a powerful and groundbreaking merging of music, visual art, dance, movement, and spoken word, anchored by the visionary music of Carnegie Hall’s 2024–2025 Debs Composer’s Chair Gabriela Ortiz, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall.

On January 20th, 2024, Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness held a  world premiere at Rice University's Brockman Hall for Opera.

The renowned chamber choir, The Crossing, led by conductor Donald Nally is the most recent addition to the collaborative, and is engaged for the project’s world premiere performance in January 2024 in Houston. An intensive project workshop will take place with them and the larger collaborative team in July 2023 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Under the direction of choreographer Harrison Guy and guest creative advisor, Lauren Anderson, the world premiere performance of Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness included a formal dance component with twelve dancers from Houston Ballet Academy's company, HBII.

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In November, the group held a weeklong workshop at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston—a principal partner in the collaboration.

In July of 2022, the collaborators came together for a one-week residency in Santa Fe, co-hosted by SITE Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Institute. The retreat, which included eight singers and the participation of local veterans, culminated in a work-in-progress public program at SITE.

Following the world premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s new work for orchestra, Clara, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, the group held meetings in New York for a two-day work intensive to adapt the original text by author Ben Sáenz.

The week-long workshop in El Paso, Texas allowed the group to collectively adapt the text written by Sáenz. While there, the group visited the El Paso / Juarez border, and explored themes prevalent in Sáenz text.

The group’s first residency took place at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming in October 2020.