The Beautiful America

1.1.1.0 1.0.0.0 perc harp strings

1. Inside the Golden Tower

excerpts of tweets from 45th President of the United States & Sonnet 66 by William Shakespeare

2. I Have Seen

excerpts from The Star Spangled Banner by Francis Scott Key & Chicago & Choose by Carl Sandburg

3. O Beautiful

excerpts from America the Beautiful by Katharine Lee Bates, Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman, & Still Life by Carl Sandburg

4. I Am the People

excerpts from My Country, ‘Tis of Thee by Samuel F. Smith & I Am the People, the Mob by Carl Sandburg

5. Beside the Golden Door

excerpts from This Land is Your Land by Woodie Guthrie, The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus, & America by Claude McKay

Program Note

My interest in writing a piece that addressed our country’s shifting paradigms of public discourse arose partly from my experiences as a performer at and attendee of various recent politically-themed choral works, and partly from my own attempt to make sense of the bizarre, grotesque “alternate reality” that seems to have permeated the news cycle and our own disunited national psyche.

Most of those other works dealt with specific events, names, and places; I decided on a more indirect approach. I wished to offer a piece that aspired to spark thought and discussion, not add fuel to the fire of an already-sharply-divided conversation. After a failed search for a librettist, I decided to assemble my own texts from a variety of sources, sometimes extracting excerpts rather than using entire poems.

 The result is a loose, sometimes abstract narrative arising from my own contemplation about our national ideals—what they mean, how sacred we actually hold them, and what we might do as individuals to uphold and defend them, powerless as we often feel against the tide.

 The music reflects this: at times overwhelming, violent, searching, comforting, scattered, unified, but always in search of the transcendental and unknowable.

Texts excerpted from various tweets from the 45th President of the United States, William Shakespeare, Carl Sandburg, Francis Scott Key, Katharine Lee Bates, Walt Whitman, Samuel F. Smith, Woody Guthrie, Claude McKay, and Emma Lazarus.