Program Note:

How prescient an American Whitman was, how trenchant in wisdom and ebullient in spirit. How he would have loathed certain contemporary political trends—so similar to the ones through which he lived. For the first song, with racism, fascism, and anti-democratic lust for minority rule on the rise, Whitman’s lines in The Year That Trembled landed. Arnold Schoenberg’s chosen pitch array for his string trio (1946) cried out to me as the ideal psychological context into which I could place Whitman’s words. Schoenberg’s musical essay about a near death experience seemed to me to provide the perfect musical metaphor for the near-death experience American democracy is currently enduring. As musical push back, I evoked in The Ship Started a roiling tonal sea in the strings to counterpoint Whitman’s celebration of the exuberance and freedom of the Age of Sail. The virtuosically arpeggiated, staunchly tonal chaconne sweeps away the hyper-emotionality and decadence of the first movement. At this particular moment in history, Whitman’s description of his dream of a prescription for civic salvation in I Dream’d in a Dream may feel like an insurmountable ask. I responded by underpinning it with the sort of circular, common tone harmonies that propel Protestant hymns and anthems. The cello joins the singer in duet during the final verse, keening with her in the fraught, coruscating key of F# major—a tonal center both glittering and rare because of its intense inherent feeling of harmonic “upward push.” On the word “love” the key of F# burns away, concluding the musical transit of the three fragments—begun with Schoenberg’s array—by resolving into the clear tonal sky of C major.