This week’s episode features an exciting institution dedicated to new music: the Apollo Chamber Players of Houston, Texas, which was founded in 2008 by Matthew J. Detrick, who serves as its first violinist as well as its executive and artistic director. The group has released nine albums, commissioned over 65 works, and in 2025 it was named Ensemble of the Year by Chamber Music America. Their latest album is We The People, which, in Mr. Detrick‘s words, “reflects the dimensions of American democracy - its ideals, its contradictions, its immigrant stories, its struggles for equality, its cultural plurality, its future, and its collective imagination”.
At just over 18 minutes, the longest work on the album is The Color Blue, composed by Houston-based composer Marcus Maroney in collaboration with students from a Houston high school. Matthew Detrick took the time to tell me about it:
Marcus is a longtime faculty composer at the University of Houston. This is our first commission by him…it started with conversation, it started with ideas, but I was really interested in finding out what young people think about the world in which we live and especially American democracy. We have a collaboration partnership with the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA) here in Houston. Sometimes we bring our guests and we do performances there and then we coach some of the kids and for this particular instance the kernel of this idea came from essays that students wrote about what democracy means to them. So it started with this question; we received about 12 to 15 different essays and some of them were poems, some of them were in different formats, but they were so touching, James - I mean just to hear 16, 17, 18 year-olds talk about what democracy means to them right now was so powerful. Marcus took the text and created a libretto for The Color Blue. It’s just for string quartet and SATB chorus. It’s three movements: first movement is “For the Fourth”, kind of a reflection on the Fourth of July; the second part is kind of a slow movement and it’s called “Thought and Prayer”; and then part three is “The Color Blue”. I think Marcus did such a great job of constructing the architecture of the piece around these musings of these students of what democracy means to them in a way that’s evocative and meaningful and I think very touching. I should mention too, James, that the chorus is made up of members of the HSPVA Chorale…they are co-creators in bringing this piece to life in every respect from the beginning, from the ideas, through the performance. I think that’s what really makes The Color Blue special.
Excerpts from the libretto:
I have discovered America’s secret. At sixteen, the day does not prompt any semblance of camaraderie. I sit by myself and pore over a photo of children my age in shackles being boarded onto a plane. I hold the word democracy in my hands and watch it bend and break apart…I know I will never be President…Por favor, no, no me quites mi hogar…I hope for a world with song. I hope for a world united.
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