Everything Rises

Everything Rises is an original, evening length staged musical work about connection, resonance, and the creation of a new artistic space. It features violinist Jennifer Koh and bass-baritone Davóne Tines, telling the story of their artistic journeys and family histories through music, projections, and recorded interviews. As a platform, it also centers the need for artists of color to be seen and heard. Developed over multiple years by an all-BIPOC creative team, the project powerfully reclaims Jennifer and Davóne's narratives about who they are and how they got to where they are now.

Everything Rises begins in the familiar cultural space of classical music, dominated by Eurocentrism and white normativity. When they meet each other, Jennifer and Davóne share a flash of mutual recognition: both are classical performers acclaimed for their virtuosity yet also have to code-switch and “corset” themselves in white institutions. They have had to put on a front in order to survive, arming themselves with scrupulous professionalism and counter-stereotypes. 

 After establishing this common ground, Jennifer and Davóne embark on an inward journey to rediscover themselves. Responding to one another musically, they gradually replace their defensive façade with a more authentic and unrestrained sense of self. The source of their newfound power lies in their family histories: Davóne shares stories of his grandmother Alma Lee Gibbs Tines about her memories of anti-Black discrimination and violence; Jennifer relates her mother Gertrude Soonja Lee Koh’s experiences of the Korean War and immigration to the U.S. Highlighting the ways in which memories and emotions are passed down through generations, Everything Rises asks what it would take for deep-seated grief, frustration, and anger to finally be recognized publicly. At the same time, these ancestral memories are full of wisdom, hope, and love. The piece is a symbolic monument dedicated to the boundless prayers, blessings, and sacrifices that these women have given so that their children and grandchildren may live better lives.

In the multiple years that Everything Rises has been in development, there has been a new surge of activism against racist violence targeting Black and Asian Americans. Inspired by the recent outpouring of support and solidarity across racial identities, Everything Rises proposes a united front through music, seeking to replace abstract slogans and inert diversity statements with lived experience and direct engagement. Jennifer and Davóne listen for resonances across Black and Asian American histories without attempting to equate or compare them. They look for ways to amplify and uplift one another’s voices, readily ceding space to one another. Standing together and poised to speak their truths, they finally look out at the audience shrouded in a cloud of whiteness. Who out there will meet their gaze? Who will listen to their stories?

0. Prologue – the White Frame

1. Game of Recognition 

DAVÓNE:

two outcasts

on an island

we find each other 

parallel histories

heavy is the tree

2. A Story of the Moth 

DAVÓNE:

I was

I was

I was the moth

I was the moth

lured by 

lured by

lured by your flame

I hated myself for needing you

dear white people

money, access, and fame

people collectors

moneyed benefactors

I’m just a thing

a Ming vase, a Picasso

you bought and sold me

in tank top and pajamas

meat on loan

your beachfront in the Bahamas

a wind-up monkey

to sing for your private dinners

I was the moth

lured by 

lure by your flame

I hated myself for needing you

dear white people

money, access, and fame

fame, access

and I yearned 

I yearned for your validation

I was unprepared

I was being sold

pleasure

among my fears

all these years

it never ends

Jenny said

“Davóne, these people are not your friends”

3. Embers (Jenny’s solo)

4. Alma’s Song

ALMA:

mama told me

about the story

about the man that was married to one of my aunts

and he was working on a farm and he and the 

white woman's daughter were going together

she got pregnant

and when she did she yelled rape

and they killed him

they rode up and down the road

and with guns on the side and

of their trucks and cars

they killed him

and hung him

cut his head off

and they kicked his head down the streets of Warrenton

and nobody did anything

to any of them

cause I was just a kid

as I got older and talked about it

I guess I got mad about it

your great, great grandmother Easter was a slave

and she lived right up the road from where we live now

and mama

used to take her dinner

and grandma Easter had

welts on her back

as big as your fingers

white people had beat her and she was in slavery

but she never gave in

she helped to start

the Trough Hill Baptist Church 

and her, three of her great, great grandchildren

graduated from MIT

and from Harvard University

and from Juilliard

nothing can stop you

a lot of black families

at the hub of it is

a strong black woman

they have to be

5. Parallel Histories 

DAVÓNE:

mmm

mmm

eh eh eh 

the tree 

bombed-out 

branches  

burning 

crosses 

how shall we build 

on the ashes of 

a nightmare? 

you asked in a song

does anybody really know

what time it is? 

does anyone really care? 

but for us 

the past weighs

heavily on the present 

and your entertainments

sound decadent

you’ve heard us play

but you’ve 

never heard us 

as people 

you think Jenny

a model minority!

but you also think

Asians are over-represented

in classical music

only Viennese

give us true,

true music 

to whom

does the music 

belong? 

ah

ah

a latch-key generation 

raised without embrace

eh

how do we dream ourselves 

out of this dark place? 

heavy is the tree

parallel histories

traumas 

woven into our skin

6. Soonja’s Song 

SOONJA:

war experience has a profound effect on one’s life

I feel lucky that I have been able 

to deal with it 

the effect is almost

the entire outlook on life

I conserve and save everything

just in case there is something happening

I remember blasting of the streets

 and houses

and as we are walking

 sometimes the airplanes

flying over

we were all told to

get off the road

and I remember looking back

it was all black cloud and 

apparently the bombs hit the ground and very loud noise

we were lucky

that we were not hit

so I saw people being tortured and people on the trees bodies 

hanging on the trees

we dug holes

just in front of the house

and that’s

whenever there’s airplane flying

we would all crawl back

into that tunnel

after all those incidents

of city battle

then they decided we should leave that town

and then go into the mountainside

there was no place to sleep

so it was like

magutgan 

where the animals are kept

I think

inner strength

is very important to me

during the war years

I wonder whether I have been able to survive

if I didn’t have any inner strength

I don’t know

where that came from 

DAVÓNE:

the tree of humanity

is an endless song

7. Fluttering Heart 

DAVÓNE:

I remember, what it means to be

truly lonely

no human beings but me

cars go by but no one but me

the first six months were the hardest

I remember, what it means to be

truly lonely

ocean sings to the child

when mama goes to the sea

cars go by but no one but me

SOONJA:

but it’s not only my parents desire to succeed in studies

but also my strong desire to succeed in my studies

and that would be the only way

I could make sure that

my life will be worthwhile

DAVÓNE:

fast asleep in his arms

baby deep asleep

mother’s heart flutters, birds cry

hurries back home to child

SOONJA:

first six months

was the hardest one

study was not hard

I knew that I could never be like

a native speaker

but I could double

triple

or even ten times

try to understand the text

and whatever

intellectual challenge it brings

DAVÓNE:

that would be the only way 

I could make sure

that my life will be 

worthwhile

so, oh, many things 

DAVÓNE:

I ask of you

your forgiveness

mmm

mmm

mmm

SOONJA:

and also

I remember

truly what loneliness means

DAVÓNE:

mmm

mmm

mmm

SOONJA:

there’s nobody except me on the whole street

everything is empty

everything is concrete

and huge buildings

cars go by

DAVÓNE:

mmm

mmm

mmm

SOONJA:

no human being

but only me

carrying groceries back and forth

DAVÓNE:

I remember, what it means to be

truly lonely

no human beings but me

cars go by but no one but me

8. Double Apology

SOONJA:

so I tried to assimilate in American culture

but I was never

completely assimilated

but at the same time

I’m a Korean

but after I was 22

I never lived in Korea

as really a grown up

so I’m never a Korean

truly Korean

I stopped at 22

so it’s like

I didn’t do really justice to you when you were growing up

because I was not neither there

neither there

so I look back and

I have

so many

apologies to you

and also so many things I ask of you forgiveness

you know

one thing that I just cannot bear myself that I never did

was

celebrating

what you have

accomplished every moment

you were with me

and that’s the hardest thing that I

I feel that

I never held you tightly

and long, long, long time

I guess because I never had enough time

JENNY:

what do you think

is the difference

between your generation

and mine?

SOONJA:

very different because

I feel

see, the reason I ask of your forgiveness is

you didn’t have choice

JENNY:

What do you mean?

SOONJA:

the first generation

immigrant

you didn’t have choice

see, I had a choice to come

but you didn’t have choice

so you have a harder time

I think

first generation has a harder time

but at the same time

I feel that first generation has

if they set their path

straight

and appropriately

then you have more opportunities

but I beg of your forgiveness

because you didn’t have

a choice

9. Amen

DAVÓNE:

when my grandma doesn’t worry

if I’ll make it home alright

when my brother won’t be taken

by a thief in the night

when I look in the mirror 

and love what I see

and I’m starin’ thru my own eyes

and not those eyes starin’ at me

then we all will say amen

then we all will say amen

when you realize your your glory

and you stop takin’ mine

when you stand in your convictions

when your hate has a spine

when I stop singin’ sings of freedom

because in fact we are free

is when you start tryin’ somethin’ else

and you stop tryin’ me

then we all will say amen

then we all will say amen

10. Strange Fruit 

DAVÓNE:

trees

sweet and black

black

black body swinging

trees

hangin’ from the poplar trees

blood on the leaves bears fruit

at the root blood in the pastoral scene

southern strange root, the bulgin’ eyes 

of the gallant trees

and the twisted mouth

scent of magnolia sweet and

and the sudden smell of burning flesh

here is a fruit for the

crows to pluck

for the rain to gather

for the wind to suck

for the sun to rot

for the tree to drop

here is a strange and bitter crop

southern trees

southern trees bear strange fruit

blood on the leaves and blood at the 

root

black bodies swingin’

in the Southern breeze

strange fruit hangin' in the poplar trees

pastoral scene of the gallant South

the bulgin' eyes and twisted mouth

scent of magnolias sweet and fresh

then the sudden smell of burnin’ flesh

here is a fruit for the crows to pluck

for the rain to gather, for the wind to 

suck

for the sun to rot, for the tree to drop

here is a strange and bitter cry

11. Better Angels 

DAVÓNE:

the better angels of our nature

“I sky you”

she used to say 

imagine  

a language 

in which I and you 

are the same 

then I can sing 

for you 

and you can 

sing for me 

words

like old swords

the pain

that lingers

within

sewn 

into 

our lives 

our memories

and skin

we can be 

subjects

and

verbs 

we 

are united

like

old trees 

that hold 

each other up

make 

a forest 

make 

cities

and worlds

weep 

for those 

who sleep

the sweep 

of history 

is long 

an arc that

bends 

towards

the light

though 

passion may 

have strained it 

every living 

heart and 

hearthstone 

yet swell 

when again 

touched

as surely they will be 

here to guide us

the better angels of our nature

the better angels of our nature

we see you

you don’t see us

we are not 

we must not

be enemies

we see you

you don’t see us

look around you 

and see where you are now?

though 

passions may 

have strained it 

every living 

heart and 

hearthstone 

yet swell 

when again 

touched

as surely they will be 

here to guide us

the better angels of our nature

the better angels of our nature

the better angels of our nature

the better angels of our nature

Jennifer Koh Violin and Co-Creator

Violinist Jennifer Koh is recognized for her intense, commanding performances, delivered with dazzling virtuosity and technical assurance. A forward-thinking artist, she is dedicated to exploring a broad and eclectic repertoire, while promoting equity and inclusivity in classical music. She has expanded the contemporary violin repertoire through a wide range of commissioning projects, and has premiered more than 100 works written especially for her. This season, Koh performs works from her series Alone Together, a commissioning project, performance, and Grammy Award-winning recording series in support of composers, during the coronavirus crisis; Bach and Beyond, which traces the history of the solo violin repertoire from Bach’s sonatas and partitas to pieces by 20th- and 21st-century composers; and The New American Concerto, which invites a diverse collective of composers to examine socio-cultural topics relevant to American life today through the form of the violin concerto. As part of this latter series, she premieres the seventh concerto: Nina Young's Traces with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and performs Missy Mazzoli's violin concerto Procession with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra. Koh has appeared with orchestras worldwide, among them the New York, Los Angeles, and Helsinki Philharmonics; Cleveland, Mariinsky, Minnesota, Philadelphia, and Philharmonia (London) Orchestras; and Atlanta, Baltimore, BBC, Chicago, Cincinnati, National, New World, NHK, RAI (Torino), and Singapore Symphonies. Named Musical America’s 2016 Instrumentalist of the Year, she has won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, Concert Artists Guild Competition, and an Avery Fisher Career Grant. She has a BA in English literature from Oberlin College and studied at the Curtis Institute, where she worked extensively with Jaime Laredo and Felix Galimir. She is an active lecturer, teacher, and recording artist for Cedille Records; and is the Artistic Director and Founder of the non-profit ARCO Collaborative.

Davóne Tines, Bass-Baritone and Co-Creator

Davóne Tines, “one of the most spellbinding singers before the public today,” (The New Yorker), is a pathbreaking artist whose work not only encompasses a diverse repertoire, from early music to new commissions by leading composers, but also explores the social issues of today. A performer at the intersection of many histories, cultures, and aesthetics, he is engaged in work that blends opera, art song, contemporary classical music, spirituals, gospel, and songs of protest, as a means to tell a deeply personal story of perseverance that connects to all of humanity. Tines is Musical America’s 2022 Vocalist of the Year. He currently serves as Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale’s first-ever Creative Partner. His ongoing projects include Recital No. 1: MASS, which explores Mass through Western European, African-American, and 21st-century traditions, which he performs at Carnegie Hall this season; Concerto No. 1: SERMON—a program he conceived for voice and orchestra weaving arias by John Adams, Anthony Davis, Igee Dieudonné, and Tines himself, with texts by James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Maya Angelou; and Concerto No. 2: ANTHEM—created by Tines with music by Michael Schachter, Caroline Shaw, Tyshawn Sorey, and Carlos Simon, and text by Mahogany L. Browne—which premiered this past summer with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. Tines recently sang the title role in Anthony Davis's  X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X with Detroit Opera, where he also served as Artist in Residence. He is a member of AMOC and co-creator of The Black Clown, a music theater experience commissioned and premiered by The American Repertory Theater and presented at Lincoln Center. He has premiered works by today’s leading composers, including John Adams, Terence Blanchard, and Matthew Aucoin, and his concert appearances include performances of works ranging from Beethoven’s Ninth, previously with the San Francisco Symphony and this season with the New York Philharmonic to Kaija Saariaho’s True Fire with the Orchestre national de France

Ken Ueno, Composer and Librettist

A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno is a composer/vocalist/sound artist who is currently a Professor at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Jerry and Evelyn Hemmings Chambers Distinguished Professor Chair in Music. Ensembles and performers who have played Ken’s music include Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Mayumi Miyata, Teodoro Anzellotti, Aki Takahashi, Wendy Richman, Greg Oakes, BMOP, Alarm Will Sound, Steve Schick and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Nieuw Ensemble, and Frances-Marie Uitti. His music has been performed at such venues as Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MusikTriennale Köln Festival, the Muziekgebouw, Ars Musica, Warsaw Autumn, Other Minds, the Hopkins Center, Spoleto USA, Steim, and at the Norfolk Music Festival. Ken’s piece for the Hilliard Ensemble, Shiroi Ishi, was featured in their repertoire for over ten years, with performances at such venues as Queen Elizabeth Hall in England, the Vienna Konzerthaus, and was aired on Italian national radio, RAI 3. Another work, Pharmakon, was performed dozens of times nationally by Eighth Blackbird during their 2001-2003 seasons. A portrait concert of Ken’s was featured on MaerzMusik in Berlin in 2011. In 2012, he was a featured artist on Other Minds 17. In 2014, Frances-Mairie Uitti and the Boston Modern Orchestra premiered his concerto for two-bow cello and orchestra, and Guerilla Opera premiered a run of his chamber opera, Gallo, to critical acclaim. He has performed as soloist in his vocal concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in New York and Boston, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Lithuanian National Symphony, the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, and with orchestras in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and California. Ken holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. A monograph CD of three orchestral concertos was released on the Bmop/sound label. His bio appears in The Grove Dictionary of American Music.

Alexander Gedeon, Director

Alexander Gedeon is a stage director and multi-disciplinary creator. Over the past six years, Alexander has primarily developed and directed new opera and concert-theater works including: The Double at Synchromy New Music; Concerto for Having Fun with Elvis on Stage at the Roy and Edna Disney Calarts Theater (REDCAT); directing/co-creating Sanctuaries at Portland’s Memorial Coliseum (Oregon ArtsWatch Pick of the Year); Messiaen’s Apparition de l’église éternelle as a solo dance at UCLA’s Royce Hall; Peter Brook’s La tragèdie de Carmen (San Diego Opera); Julius Eastman’s Stay On It (San Francisco Conservatory of Music); performing spoken word with the Grammy-winning Billy Childs Jazz Chamber Ensemble and the Lyris Quartet; lecturing on Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music at Harvard University with fine artist Tomashi Jackson. In the mid 2000s, Alexander led the New York based trio Trick & the Heartstrings, composing and choreographing a live show London’s New Music Express called "a supertight howl of righteous rhythm and blues with jaw-dropping pop twists.” The outfit signed to 679 Records with Grammy-winning producer Paul Epworth. Soon after, Alexander led the six-piece disco ensemble Yellow Alex & the Feelings, garnering consistent radio airplay and placements on ABC-TV and the iTunes Worldwide playlist. As an associate director, Alexander’s credits include: John Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2 (LA Philharmonic); David Lang’s anatomy theater (LA Opera/Beth Morrison Projects/Ridge Theater); the Pulitzer Prize winning premiere of Anthony Davis’s The Central Park Five and Kate Soper’s The Killing Jar (Long Beach Opera); the forthcoming world premiere of Proximity at Lyric Opera of Chicago by Caroline Shaw, Daniel Bernard Romaine and Anna Deavere Smith, directed by Yuval Sharon. Alexander is a graduate of New York University's Experimental Theater Wing and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. 

Kee-Yoon Nahm, Narrative Structure and Dramaturgy

Kee-Yoon Nahm, D.F.A. (Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism, Yale School of Drama) is Assistant Professor in Theatre Studies at Illinois State University and Festival Dramaturg at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. He works as a dramaturg and theatre translator in the United States and South Korea. His translations have been staged at the National Theatre Company of Korea, the Seoul Performing Arts Festival, Illinois State University, and Yale Cabaret. His dramaturgy work include productions at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Yale Repertory Theatre, Yale Cabaret, the National Gugak Center, and the National Dance Company of Korea. He also works as regional editor for The Theatre Times, where he covers contemporary South Korean theatre.

Gertrude Soonja Lee Koh, Text
Gertrude Soonja Lee Koh was born in 1943 in Ongjin, now located within the borders of North Korea. Her family were refugees during the Korean War, fleeing the north to escape persecution from communists. Soonja first came to the U.S. in 1965 with one suitcase and $30 in her pocket to pursue a graduate degree in Library and Information Science. Settling in the suburbs of Chicago after earning her Ph.D., she had a long and esteemed career in higher education. During this time, she also supported her daughter Jennifer’s musical training and career.

Alma Lee Gibbs Tines, Text
Alma Lee Gibbs, born in 1946, is the grandmother of Davóne Tines and a native of Northern Virginia. For decades Alma has been a fixture in her community as a special education teacher, church clerk, and matriarch to a family of three children, eight grandchildren, and two great grandchildren.

Hana S. Kim, Projection and Set Designer
Hana S. Kim is a scenic and projection designer with experience across film, graphic design and public art. Her work has been seen in theaters across the country and internationally, including at the Public Theater in NYC, A.C.T. in SF, SF Symphony, LA Opera, Geffen Playhouse, Pasadena Playhouse, Baltimore Center Stage, Shaw Festival and South Coast Rep. Her art installations have been shown at the Annenberg Space of Photography in LA, Jordan Downs Recreation Center, Occidental College and Baryshinikov Arts Center in NY. Hana is a recipient of the Princess Grace Award in Theater Design, Richard Sherwood Award from CTG, and Kinetic Lighting Award for distinguished achievement in theatrical design from LA Drama Critics Circle. Her designs have been recognized by the Helen Hayes Award, Stage Raw Awards, StageSceneLA Awards and Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Awards. She is a member of United Scenic Artists Local 829. For portfolio: www.hananow.com

Carolina Ortiz Herrera, Lighting Designer
Carolina Ortiz Herrera is a Mexican-born and New York-based Lighting Designer for theatre, opera, and dance. Regional: I & You (Bristol Riverside Theatre), Doubt, A Parable (Westport Country Playhouse), A Woman of the World, Until the Flood (Merrimack Theatre Repertory); All’s Well That Ends Well (Oregon Shakespeare Festival); American Mariachi (Arizona Theatre Company), The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Northern Stage); Seven Guitars (Yale Repertory Theatre). Other theatre: Yellowman, nominated for Best Lighting Design at Audelco’s Awards (Billie Holiday Theatre); She Persisted (Atlantic Theatre Company); Sweeney Todd (Yale Dramat); Titus Andronicus, Women Beware Women, and The Skin of Our Teeth (Yale University Theatre). Opera: Florencia en el Amazonas (Shubert Theatre); The Silent Lyre (Lighten Theatre); Trouble in Tahiti (New Jersey University); and The Cunning Little Vixen (Opera Theatre of Yale). Education: MFA, Yale School of Drama. www.carolinaeortiz.com

Lena Sands, Costume Designer
Lena Sands is an award-winning costume designer for live performance, installation, and film. Using a variety of materials and methods to create bold and distinctive visuals, Lena collaborates with ensembles and communities to investigate bodies, histories, and the divine. Her most recent projects include four larks’ Hymns, a collection of opera music videos filmed at the Getty Villa, and the world premiere of The Fig and the Wasp, a meditation on loneliness and motherhood in a world of conflict. Other favorite designs include SITI Company’s Bacchae (BAM, Guthrie, Getty Villa); four larks’ Frankenstein (The Wallis; Ovation Award); CMPG’s AMERYKA (Kirk Douglas Theater; Ovation nomination); How to Catch A Karen (Naked Empire Buffon); A Jordan Downs Illumination, Ghost Town (Cornerstone); Cuckoo’s Nest (After Hours, Stage Raw nomination); Untitled Communion, Substrata (REDCAT); Manon (Curtis Institute); The Bumps (Skirball, BBC documentary); Next to Normal, and Kentucky (East West Players). Her designs for Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks were displayed at the State Historical Museum in Moscow as part of the exhibition “Innovative Costume of the 21st Century: The Next Generation.”  Lena was a 2021 CTG Sherwood Award finalist. She has an MFA in Design for Performance from California Institute of the Arts.

Kirk Baltzell, Stage Manager
Kirk Baltzell (they/them) is a stage manager, composer, and writer based in New York City. They recently completed the Professional Apprentice Program at The Juilliard School after graduating from The University of Texas at Austin where they studied theatre, music composition, and classics, and are now freelancing with a current emphasis on the Broadway circuit and other large-scale music-based and inter-disciplinary projects. Ultimately, they hope to build a vast and varied life that is centered on genuineness, empathy, and love.

Code-Switching 

In juxtaposing references to classical music, avant-garde new music, electronic music, Korean music, ambient electronica, 70s pop songs, and a salve (a song that delivers an emotional affirmation and comfort like a lullaby, without being a lullaby), Everything Rises is a musical platform for code-switching that resists the Western inclination towards synthesis. Code-switching stands for the immigrant experience—we are the ones who are compelled to speak multiple languages, learn to eat other foods, and adapt to dominant codes. Code-switching is anti-modernist fragmentation that shifts our understanding of time and history, our sense of validity from the Hegelian to non-Western frames, and to advocate for the possibility that such diverse perspectives can be possible. In creating new spaces for marginalized bodies to speak our truths (foregrounded by a libretto informed by ethnographic research), we are reclaiming our, as of yet marginalized, voices as self-narrators.

Ethnography as Composition

Over several months, Ken Ueno (composer and librettist) and Kee-Yoon Nahm (dramaturg) interviewed Jennifer Koh and Davóne Tines, asking how they wanted to express their experiences with racism in classical music, as well as how the racialized traumas of their matriarchal forebears (Gertrude Soonja Lee Koh and Alma Lee Gibbs Tines) shaped their lives. Ueno then wrote the libretto based on the interview transcripts, versifying their stories, while also adding poetic commentary of his own invention. Ueno, Nahm, and Alexander Gedeon (director) also shaped the narrative structure from these interviews, loosely following the trajectory of the piece’s multi-year creative process. Nahm also helped Ueno curate selections from interviews with Koh’s mother and Tines’s grandmother, which are played as voiceovers in several songs. The voice-overs, a film-documentary operation, serves as a kind of recitative in operatic terms, which Ueno had previously experimented with in his earlier theater work, Gallo.

Words as Sounds

As Ueno wrote the libretto, he chose vowels and consonants in the poetry with musical affordances in mind. For example, the elongated “ee” is often displaced from words like “tree” and orchestrationally paired with scratch tones on the violin (over-pressured bow producing a noise-like sound) to evoke parallel histories of racialized violence (bodies hanging from trees is a shared image of violence across the Korean War and the lynchings of Black Americans).  

There are several references woven into the libretto which might be helpful to highlight for the audience. The question, “How shall we build on the ashes of a nightmare?” in the song “Parallel Histories” is quoted from eminent historian Robin Kelley’s book Freedom Dreams (a history of revolutionary African American intellectuals and artists in the twentieth century). The title of the final song, “Better Angels,” nods to the concluding lines of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address:

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Symbolic Values in the Music

The aforementioned scratch tone on the violin that represents racialized violence is deployed as a recurring motif. Besides text-setting words that evoke violence in the libretto (e.g. flesh in “Strange Fruit”), this harsh sound permeates the score on its own, as in the solo violin movement “Embers” (which recurs as the intro to “Strange Fruit”).

Symbolic values also factored in the selection of G major as the key for the sequences relating to Koh’s mother—her experiences during the Korean War and the early years of her immigration to the United States. The key was chosen, in part, with consideration for the violin’s lowest open string and the range of Tines’s voice, but also for its relationality to the most common tuning of the most iconic of Korean instruments, the kayageum.

While the symbolic value of referencing the kayageum in this way is more abstract, there are also overt evocations of Korean music in the score. Having collaborated with traditional instrumentalists over the past twenty years, Ueno drew upon his experience to compose music that leans towards Korean traditional music, especially the repertoire of the haegum, a two-string bowed instrument, in the sections that recount Koh’s mother’s experiences during the Korean War in “Soonja’s Song” and “Fluttering Heart.”

Finally, throughout the piece, from the profundo bass of “A Story of the Moth” (a cutting soliloquy for Tines) to the concluding angelic falsetto of “Better Angels” (the musical salve), Tines’s voice navigates an ever-rising range and keys from song to song —a symbolic, yet also embodied, narrative of hope for Everything Rises.