The San Francisco Girls Chorus concludes its season with the world premiere of Tomorrow’s Memories: A Little Manila Diary, an exciting new SFGC-commissioned choral-opera from American composer Matthew Welch. The semi-staged work is based on Tomorrow's Memories, A Diary, 1924-1928, the diary writings of Filipina immigrant Angeles Monrayo, and reflects on the importance of the Filipino diaspora’s cultural impact on America particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Using libretto set to Angeles Monrayo’s personal diary adapted by the composer, Tomorrow’s Memories tells both a Bay Area related Filipino-American coming-of-age story and celebrates the diversity of Filipino music, culture and diaspora. Angeles’s prose, written across four and a half years following emigration from the Philippines to Hawaii, San Francisco and Stockton, explores the joys and trials of being a young immigrant woman, redefining gender-norms, supporting a family as a child, and encounters with racism and sexism.