Though Angel Island began with Del Sol Quartet’s collaboration with composer Huang Ruo, poet Genny Lim and arts educator Andi Wong are essential to everything the project has become and continues to be. Together we discuss the components of successful collaboration, the necessity of holding each other’s stories to discover truth, and the beauty of checking your ego at the door.

Immigration is a hot-button topic for many nations around the world, and especially in the United States. The Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation is one organization that not only seeks to preserve the history of immigration through Angel Island, but also to steward a culture that recognizes the complexities of immigration and works to build a community of safety and belonging.

Del Sol’s relationship with Susan Moffat began as a chance encounter at a spontaneous street performance during the pandemic. In this bonus episode, hear how that meeting blossomed into impactful collaborations at the Albany Bulb and Angel Island, and an entire curriculum of programming at UC Berkeley, A Year on Angel Island.

This is for young artists, musicians, new ensembles, and anyone seeking to take on bigger or more complex projects in their creative work!

Emiko Ono is the Director, Performing Arts Program at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

In this short excerpt, Charlton and Emiko are discussing the creative process and offering insight based on their own experiences for aspiring artists who are in pursuit of funding and resources in order to realize their vision.

“My hope is not to divide, but to bring people together. Because only when we know about the history, then we can see our present and can learn [from] mistakes and to do better.” So says composer and conductor Huang Ruo on his vision for Angel Island.

This bonus is an excerpt of Charlton’s interview with Matthew Ozawa, stage director for the New York premiere of Angel Island at BAM produced by Beth Morrison Productions.

In this clip, Matthew shares how his first experience on Angel Island and personal family history inspired the staging of the Prototype Festival staging. And Charlton describes how this project has shifted his own relationship to the energy of the Immigration Station detention barracks.

One of the complexities of Angel Island by Huang Ruo is that vocal parts are alternately in English and Chinese. For American choral groups, who are familiar with practicing Italian, German, French, and Latin diction, Chinese is not a common language with which they often have experience. And for this project, it was important to get it right.

Hear our behind the scenes conversation about producing the award-winning season 1 of Sounds Current with our producer and editor, Andrea Klunder, from her podcast The Creative Impostor.

As we close out this season of Sounds Current, Charlton and esteemed collaborators reflect on their experiences related to the development and subsequent productions of Angel Island. How have the music, the conversations, and their experiences on Angel Island shaped their understanding of the current immigration debate in the US and beyond?

Charlton invites Del Sol collaborators to elaborate on their roles in the creation, performance, and ongoing support of The Angel Island Project. What role did the COVID-19 pandemic play in the development of the piece? What was it like to play the oratorio in the place that inspired it? How has interpretation of the piece expanded outside the confines of Angel Island? What can art teach us about 20th-century immigration policies, and how can it inform 21st-century solutions?

Much like Angel Island, the project, Angel Island, the place, is a point of entry, connecting many visitors to a history they know nothing about––and reminding some of a traumatic past they'd rather forget. 

Welcome to Angel Island. With stunning views of San Francisco Bay and lush hiking trails, the island is nestled between the promise of the Golden Gate Bridge and California’s sun-soaked mainland coast. But between 1910 and 1940, hundreds of thousands of Asians arriving at the Angel Island Immigration Station faced separation, interrogation, and often deportation under the longstanding Chinese Exclusion Act. 

How does a string quartet help build community from Chinese immigrant poetry carved into detention-center walls on Angel Island? Let their words sing out after 100 years of silence.