Program notes, texts, and translations

Nocturne (composed 2008) by Eric Tuan is a setting of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s poem Tonight I can write the saddest lines. The composer writes:

 “My first experience with choral music came through my involvement with the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir, the Oakland-based youth choral program for which I now serve as Artistic Director. Alongside supporting my budding interests in singing, collaborative piano, and conducting, founding Artistic Director Robert Geary took a particular interest in my composing and has been a staunch advocate for my music ever since. Composed during the summer following my senior year of high school, Nocturne is a meditation on lost love through the words of poet Pablo Neruda. The poetry is taken from Neruda’s collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, written when he was nineteen years old. It remains the best-selling book of poetry in the Spanish language. Nocturne sets the opening portion of the twentieth poem, ‘Tonight I can write the saddest lines.’ The musical setting has a stream-of-consciousness quality, tracing the poet’s thoughts as they wander between memories of his lost love and the melancholy of the night sky.“

Puedo escribir 

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche. 

Escribir, por ejemplo: “La noche está estrellada, 

y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos.” 

El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta. 

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche. 

Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso. 

En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos. 

La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito. 

Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería. 

Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos. 

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche. 

Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido. 

Oír la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella. 

Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío. 

Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla. 

La noche está estrellada y ella no está conmigo. 

Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos. 

        Words: © Copyright by Fundación Pablo Neruda.  Used by permission.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. 

Write, for example, “The night is starry and the blue stars 

shiver, in the distance.” 

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. 

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. 

I loved her, and at times she loved me as well. 

During nights like this one I held her in my arms. 

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky. 

She loved me, at times I loved her as well. 

How could I not love her great, still eyes. 

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. 

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her. 

To hear the immense night, more immense without her. 

And the verse falls to the soul as dew to the pasture. 

What does it matter that my love could not keep her. 

The night is filled with stars and she is not with me. 

This is all. In the distance, someone is singing. In the distance. 

        Translation: © Copyright by Alice Del Simone.  Used by permission.

Emi Nakamura is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, singer, and music educator. She graduated from Princeton  University in 2013 with a concentration in music composition and a minor in theater and education. She has written original music and music directed for children's theaters nationwide prior to joining Seattle Pro Musica, and is  grateful for the opportunity to premier her first choral composition with this ensemble. Rosemary  was commissioned by Seattle Pro Musica’s Chroma Ensemble, in loving, everlasting memory of Allison Freel. The composer writes: 

“This tribute to Allison Freel is for anyone who has lost a loved one. The intention of this piece, through its simple yet lush harmonies and textures, is to hold space for its listeners to find peace in the midst of loss. I encourage you to close your eyes and envision yourself on a neighborhood walk. Appreciate the birds and their songs, and say hello to the neighborhood cats. If you point out the rosemary bushes and run your fingers through them as you pass by, perhaps you'll find that your loved one is not far away at all.”

Rosemary
I’ve planted on the window sill some hyacinth and rosemary.
The first that I may think of you, the one to make you think of me.
So when I waken to the day, the day remote and vague and tall,
their loveliness is pure and sweet, and you not far away at all. 

—Yvonne Webb

Dawn, Unhindered (composed 2019) by Eric Tuan. The composer writes: 

“During the Second World War, over 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona—nearly two-thirds of them American citizens—were rounded up and forced into internment camps. Accused of posing a security risk solely on the basis of their Japanese heritage, they spent the war behind barbed wire fences at camps located in remote areas of the United States. Yet despite the challenging conditions within the camps, musical and literary endeavors still flourished. Among them was the art of kaiko haiku, a contemporary, freely-structured take on the traditional Japanese literary form. Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, a poet held at the centers in Jerome, Arkansas, and Tule Lake, California, collected and translated many of these haiku in her seminal anthology May Sky: An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku.

“Reading through the collection, I was struck by the poets’ ability to find glimpses of beauty in their isolated surroundings and in the routines of everyday camp life. The image of the sun featured prominently throughout, whether rising majestically over the snowy mountains or shining through the cracks in their drafty barracks. Capturing these brief moments of transcendence through poetry seemed to be an act of resistance against the harsh and utilitarian circumstances of their captivity.    

“Dawn, Unhindered sets six haiku composed by internees in concentration camps and assembly centers at Rohwer, Santa Fe, Lordsburg, Gila, Jerome, and Stockton. I have set them in dialogue with texts from two different wisdom traditions that celebrate the sun as a symbol of justice and enlightenment. The first is the Advent antiphon O Oriens, which describes Jesus as the dawn of justice breaking through the darkness of tyranny. The second is an ecstatic celebration of light drawn from the Gitanjali (Song Offerings) of the Bengali polymath and anti-imperialist Rabindranath Tagore. Together, the texts bear witness to the power of light and beauty in the midst of darkness and oppression.  

“I am deeply grateful to Kimi de Cristoforo, the daughter of poet and translator Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, for granting permission to use the haiku from her mother’s anthology. Her kindness and support for this project have been invaluable.”

Dawn, Unhindered
Haiku from “May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow, An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku.”
Compiled, Translated, and Prefaced by Violet Kazue de Cristoforo.
Sun & Moon Press: Los Angeles, 1997. Used by permission of Kimi de Cristoforo.

Iron fence immovable
over the mountain
winter sun rises
—Shiho Okamoto 

O Radiant Dawn, splendor of eternal light, sun of justice!
Come, shine on those who dwell in darkness and the
shadow of death.
—O Antiphon appointed for December 21 (“O Oriens”) 

Hand-cuffed and taken away
I see my husband
even today
—Sadayo Taniguchi 

In the shade of summer sun
guard tapping rock
with club
—Shiho Okamoto

End of friend’s life
has come
grass is green and wet
—Youko Shinoda 

Between ceiling slats
and thick electric wires
dawn comes through unhindered
—Kyotaro Komuro 

Majestic sunrise
on side of the mountain
snow lingers
—Shiho Okamoto 

Light, my light, the world-filling light, the eye-kissing light, heart-sweetening light! Ah, the light dances! Light, my light, the world-filling light!
—Rabindranath Tagore, from Gitanjali 57  

Kala Pierson is a composer and sound artist. Based in the US, she works worldwide in venues ranging from Lincoln Center and the Guggenheim Museum to warehouses and forests. Pierson's music is vivid, full-throated, and rooted in the joy and urgency of communication. Whether writing boundary-pushing music for The Crossing and American Opera Projects, installing audio in an abandoned fortress, or performing endurance art at the Guggenheim Museum, she works from her own meditative and sensory/sensual experience, producing deeply embodied music that challenges while luxuriating in the performers' best qualities. She's a self-taught santur (Persian hammered dulcimer) player and a laptop/audio performer. Her career-long love for finding and setting meaningful, recent texts has led her to settings of American journalist  Mumia Abu-Jamal and others writing from death row; Cameroonian gay rights martyr Roger Mbede; texts in honor  of the BlackLivesMatter movement; and the many writers in her Axis of Beauty project (in which, since 2004, she has collected and set to music a broad range of texts by living Middle Eastern writers).

The text for Blue Phoenix is from an interview (in English) with Iraqi artist Esam Pasha, used with kind permission of warnewsradio.org. 

Blue Phoenix
When the bombs were falling, I was crazy enough to get on the roof.
I felt I should see this, because artists are the eyes of the culture.
It was beautiful—you know?
When all the stores were closed, and Baghdad was really a hot spot,
I kept on doing art until I ran out of pigment.
There was nothing to paint with, except boxes of crayons.
So I mixed up wax paint, using heat.
The blue one is my favorite.
You see the blue color taking over everything,
but also reds and yellows penetrating the blues,
like flashing rockets penetrating the calm sky.

Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, composer, pianist and conductor, is reported to have been as musically gifted as her younger brother and renowned composer Felix Mendelssohn. She studied piano and composition from a young age, and played J.S. Bach's entire Wohltemperiertes Klavier (The Well-Tempered Clavier) from memory at the age of 13.  Because she was female, her father confined her activities to the domestic sphere, not allowing her the opportunities for travel, public performance, and publication which were given to brother Felix. However, for many years, she organized and performed regular concerts for a small circle of friends and musicians at her salon in Berlin, performing as both pianist and conductor. Though a prolific composer of piano, chamber, vocal, and choral music, most of her works were never published. She published some pieces under Felix's name, but he discouraged Fanny from publishing under her own name, even though he held her compositions and musicianship in high esteem. As Fanny put it, Felix “has no other musical adviser than me, and he never commits anything to paper without showing it to me first for my examination.” 

In 1846, the year before her death, she received offers from two Berlin music publishers, and published a few of her songs, piano pieces, and choral works, including the Gartenlieder. As the title suggests, these choral settings were intended for performance out of doors as well as indoors. 

Im Herbst
Seid gegrüßt mit Frühlingswonne,
Blauer Himmel, goldne Sonne!
Drüben auch aus Gartenhallen
Hör' ich frohe Saiten schallen. 

Ahnest du, o Seele wieder
Sanfte, süße Frühlingslieder?
Sieh umher die falben Bäume!
Ach, es waren holde Träume!

Greetings to you with springtime joy,
Blue heavens, golden sunlight!
Yonder, too, from the garden bowers
I hear happy strings resounding. 

O soul, do you discern once again
Soft, sweet songs of spring?
Look about you at the dun-colored trees.
Ah, it was a lovely dream!

Abendlich schon rauscht der Wald
Abendlich schon rauscht der Wald
Aus den tiefen Gründen,
Droben wird der Herr nun bald
An die Sterne zünden.
Wie so stille in den Schlünden,
Abendlich nur rauscht der Wald. 

Alles geht zu seiner Ruh.
Wie die Welt verbrause,
Schauernd hört der Wandrer zu,
Sehnt sich tief nach Hause.
Hier in Waldes stiller Klause,
Herz, geh endlich auch zur Ruh.

Evening breezes rustle yet in the wood
from the deepest grounds;
above the lord will now soon
light the stars.
How silent in the chasms!
Just evening breezes in the wood. 

Everything goes to its rest.
Wood and world vanish;
shuddering, the wanderer listens,
yearning for home.
Here in the quiet hermitage of the forest,
Heart, at last too go to rest. 

Im Wald
Im Wald, im hellen Sonnenschein,
wenn alle Knospen springen,
dann mag ich gerne mittendrein
eins singen. 

Wie mir zu Mut in Leid und Lust,
im Wachen und im Träumen,
das stimm ich an aus voller Brust
den Bäumen. 

Und sie verstehen mich gar fein,
die Blätter alle lauschen
und fall'n am rechten Orte ein,
mit Rauschen. 

Und weiter wandelt Schall und Hall,
in Wipfeln, Fels und Büschen.
Hell schmettert auch Frau Nachtigall
dazwischen. 

Da fühlt die Brust am eignen Klang,
sie darf sich was erkühnen,
O frische Luft! Gesang!
Gesang im Grünen.

In the forest, in bright sunshine,
when all the buds spring up,
it is right in the middle of there that I like
to sing a song. 

According to my mood, in sorrow and joy,
awake and in dreams,
I give it voice with full heart
to the trees. 

And they understand me to the letter,
the leaves eavesdrop
and fall in at the right place,
with rustling. 

And the sound and echo wander farther,
through the treetops, rocks, and bushes.
Mrs. Nightingale also blares away brightly
in the midst of it all. 

Then, when the heart hears its own sound,
it feels it can do whatever it dares to,
oh what a lively pleasure, a song,
a song among the greenery. 

Williametta Spencer is a composer, educator, organist, and pianist. She holds a PhD in composition from the University of Southern California, and studied in Paris as a Fulbright Scholar. At the round earth's imagined corners is a setting of English poet John Donne’s Divine Sonnet VII which describes the end of the world and the last judgment. 

At the round earth's imagined corners
At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scatter'd bodies go;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you whose eyes
Shall behold God and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,
For if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace
When we are there; here on this lowly ground
Teach me how to repent; for that's as good
As if thou hadst seal'd my pardon with thy blood.

Unending Love (composed 2017) is the third work on our program by guest composer Eric Tuan.  He writes:  

“One of my formative musical experiences as an undergraduate was singing in Stanford  University’s Chamber Chorale under the leadership of Dr. Stephen M. Sano. In the ensuing years, I have had the privilege of composing choral music for the weddings of no fewer than six alumni of the ensemble. Among them was the 2017 wedding of Chorale alum Julian  Kusnadi to music educator Emily Ryan, an event that brought together over thirty professional singers from across the San Francisco Bay Area. Richly scored for eight independent voice parts, Unending Love draws on the poetry of the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore. The first person of color to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Tagore’s work ranged widely across the realms of poetry, fiction, drama, visual art, and musical composition. I give Tagore’s lyrical poetry an equally effusive musical setting, drawing on lush added-tone sonorities and overlapping waves of imitative counterpoint.”

Unending Love      
You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell—
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.
Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all our days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours—
And the songs of every poet past and forever.
—from Unending Love (1890) by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by William Radice

Let Them Not Say by Eric Tuan was commissioned by Seattle Pro Musica as part of our ongoing “New American Composers Series.” We are honored to present the world premiere of this important new work that addresses the issue of climate change. 

The composer writes: 

“‘Everybody knows what must be done if the world is to continue to be a liveable place, if our homes are not to be invaded by the sea…and yet we are powerless, even the most powerful among us,’ laments one character in Indian author Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island. Through his writing, Ghosh articulates what seems to me one of the central challenges of the climate crisis: that climate change is as much a spiritual as a technological problem. Our understanding does not move from our heads to our hearts, from our intellects to our souls, in a way that spurs us to the acts of radical imagination, creation, and solidarity that are needed to meet the challenge.

“Jane Hirshfield’s poem Let Them Not Say eloquently expresses that tension between bearing witness and becoming a bearer of change. I’ve tried to capture the hypnotic quality and fierce lament of Jane’s words in my musical setting. A litany of witness to the realities of climate change—’we saw, we heard, we ate, we trembled’—spills forth, at first from individual voices and then from the entire community. The voices flare upwards to describe the ‘kerosene beauty’ of our burning world, before flickering downwards to close with the testimony of a single soloist.“

Let them not say (World premiere, composed 2023) 

Let them not say: we did not see it. 

We saw. 

Let them not say: we did not hear it. 

We heard. 

Let them not say: they did not taste it. 

We ate, we trembled. 

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written. 

We spoke, 

we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say: they did nothing. 

We did not-enough. 

Let them say, as they must say something: 

A kerosene beauty. 

It burned. 

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it, 

read by its light, praised, 

and it burned. 

—"Let Them Not Say" © Jane Hirshfield, 

     from Ledger (NY: Knopf , 2020).  
    Used by permission of the author, all rights reserved.

A National Medal of Arts recipient, Morten Lauridsen was composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale (1994–2001) and professor of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music for 52 years. His choral music occupies a permanent place in the standard vocal repertoire of the 20th and 21st centuries, and is currently the most-performed choral music by an American composer. His works have been recorded on over a hundred CDs by ensembles including the Robert Shaw, Dale Warland, and Donald Brinegar Singers; the San Francisco, Cleveland, and Dallas Symphony Choruses; Seattle Pro Musica; the Los Angeles and San Francisco Chamber Singers; New York Concert Singers; Germany's Nordic Chamber Choir; and Finland's Lumen Valo. 

The composer writes: 

“Sa Nuit d’Été is the first movement of my Nocturnes, the Brock commission from the American Choral Directors Association. Each of the poems in the set addresses aspects of the common theme of ‘night.’ For Rilke’s impassioned and atmospheric Sa Nuit d’Été (Its Summer Night), several melodic themes are supported by dense, colorful harmonies in both the choral and piano parts, leading to a climactic section where all are combined and stated simultaneously.”

Sa Nuit d’Été
Si je pourrais avec mes mains brûlantes 

fondre ton corps autour ton coeur d’amante, 

ah que la nuit deviendrait transparente 

le prenant pour un astre attardé 

qui toujours dès le premier temps 

des mondes 

était perdu et qui commence sa ronde 

et tâtonnant de sa lumière blonde 

sa première nuit, sa nuit, sa nuit d’été.

If, with my burning hands, I could melt 

the body surrounding your lover’s heart, 

ah! how the night would become translucent, 

taking it for a late star, 

which, from the first moments 

of the world, 

was forever lost, and which begins its course 

with its blonde light, trying to reach out 

its first night, its night, its summer night. 

German composer Johannes Brahms composed more than 200 works for chorus, ranging from the monumental Ein deutsches Requiem to settings of German folksongs. The three short part-songs on our program represent the essence of Brahms’s late 19th-century German Romanticism. 

Der Gang zum Liebchen is an actual folk song text that Brahms found in the collection Deutsche Volkslieder, and his setting is eminently folksong-like in its use of recurring rhythmic patterns and melodic motives. The text describes a lover’s worries about their beloved, tortured by anxious thoughts of unfaithfulness, all under the watchful eye of the moon. Composed in the summer of 1884, Abendlied and O schöne Nacht are suffused with imagery of nature and love. Brahms was reportedly “in the best of spirits” after hearing them premiered by the Krefeld Singverein in January 1885. A memoirist of the time reported on the composer’s outing to the Lower Rhine with a group of friends: “In the village street that follows the river’s course, children were playing and Brahms delighted them with candies that he magically produced out of his coat pocket…The concert had been very successful and the lovely sun-drenched countryside delighted these lovers of nature.” 

Abendlied

Friedlich bekämpfen Nacht sich und Tag;
wie das zu dämpfen, wie das zu lösen vermag.
Der mich bedrückte, schläfst du schon, Schmerz?
Was mich beglückte, was war's doch, mein Herz?
Freude wie Kummer, fühl ich, zerran,
aber den Schlummer führten sie leise heran.
Und im Entschweben, immer empor,
kommt mir das Leben ganz wie ein
Schlummerlied vor.
        —Friedrich Hebbel

Night and day are engaged in peaceful struggle
as if they are able to dampen or to dissolve.
Are you asleep, Grief, who depressed me?
What was it then, my heart, that made me happy?
Both joy and sorrow, I feel, did melt away
but gently they introduced the slumber.
And, while evermore floating upward,
life itself appears to me
like a lullaby. 

Der Gang zum Liebchen 

Es glänzt der Mond nieder,
Ich sollte doch wieder
Zu meinem Liebchen,
Wie mag es ihr gehn? 

Ach weh, sie verzaget 

Und klaget, und klaget, 

Daß sie mich nimmer 

Im Leben wird sehn! 

Es ging der Mond unter,

Ich eilte doch munter, 

Und eilte daß keiner 

Mein Liebchen entführt. 

Ihr Täubchen, o girret, 

Ihr Lüftchen, o schwirret, 

Daß keiner mein Liebchen, 

Mein Liebchen entführt! 

        —Josef Wenzig 

The moon gleams down,
So I should set out 

Again to my love, 

How is she, I wonder? 

Alas, she’s despairing 

And lamenting, lamenting 

That she’ll never see 

Me again in her life! 

The moon went down, 

But I hurried off briskly, 

Hurried so that no one 

Should steal my love. 

Keep cooing, you doves, 

Keep whispering, you breezes, 

So that no one 

Should steal my love! 

O schöne Nacht
O schöne Nacht
am Himmel märchenhaft erglänzt
der Mond in seiner ganzen Pracht;
Um ihn der kleinen Sterne
liebliche Genossenschaft.
O schöne Nacht 

Es schimmert hell der Tau 

am grünen Halm; 

Mit Macht im Fliederbusche schlägt die Nachtigall.

Der Knabe schleicht zu seiner Liebsten sacht. 

O schöne Nacht! 

        —Georg Friedrich Daumer

Oh lovely night!
In the heavens, the moon gleams magically 

In all its splendor; 

Around it, the sweet company 

of little stars. 

Oh lovely night! 

The dew shimmers brightly 

on the green blades of grass; 

The nightingale sings ardently in the lilac bush; 

The boy steals softly to his sweetheart. 

Oh lovely night! 

Journey of Song (composed 2014) is our final piece by Eric Tuan. The composer writes: 

“One of my formative musical experiences was participating in the Golden Gate International Choral Festival, a triennial gathering of leading youth choirs from around the globe hosted by the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir. Over my years of participating in the festival as a singer, pianist, and now Artistic Director, I have had the opportunity to work with singers from every continent except Antarctica, and delight in the cultural exchange that the universal language of music makes possible. 

“Journey of Song was commissioned by Suzie and Dick Rahl for the 10th Golden Gate Festival in 2015. The text is drawn from the opening verses of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. These beautiful words speak eloquently of the ways in which singing can bridge national and cultural barriers, bringing people together through shared music-making. The premiere was given by a massed ensemble of twenty choirs from around the world, hailing from countries as diverse as Indonesia, Finland, Estonia, China, Poland, Austria, Canada, and the United States. This English version of the Kalevala text has been adapted from two translations by W.F. Kirby and John Martin Crawford, which both strive to preserve the original meter of the Finnish poetry. 

“The Kalevala was originally sung to a traditional Finnish runic melody in 5/4 meter, which accommodates the trochaic tetrameter [the stress pattern DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da] of the text. In Journey of Song, I combine one of these traditional melodies with a newly composed one to create a cross-cultural hybrid of ancient and modern.“

Journey of Song  

I am driven by my longing, 

By a mighty inward urging, 

I am ready now for singing, 

Ready to begin the chanting, 

I will sing the people's legends, 

And the ballads of the nation, 

Handed down from by-gone ages. 

In my mouth the words are melting, 

From my lips the tones are gliding, 

From my tongue they wish to hasten, 

When my willing teeth are parted, 

When my ready mouth is opened. 

I am ready now for singing. 

Golden friend, and dearest neighbor, 

Dear companion of my childhood,

Come and sing with me the stories, 

Come and chant with me the legends, 

Legends of the time forgotten, 

Since we now are here together, 

Come together from our roamings. 

Seldom do we come for singing, 

Seldom to the one, the other. 

Let us clasp our hands together, 

Let us interlock our fingers;

Join we now in merry singing, 

Chant we now the oldest folk-lore, 

While our dear ones hearken to us, 

While the young are standing round us, 

Of the rising generation, 

Let them learn the words of magic. 

—From the Kalevala