We’re All Here (2002)
For Mixed Chorus and Ten Instruments or Piano
SSAATTB, flute, oboe, clarinet, marimba/vibraphone, piano, 2 violins, viola, cello, contrabass
SSAATTBB and Piano
Year: 2002
Duration: 12’
Text: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Charles Sprague (E)
Movement Titles: Pied Beauty (Gerard Manley Hopkins) [3:16] | Raking Leaves (Robert Frost) [2:56] | We're All Here (Charles Sprague) [5:42]
Dedication: “Commissioned by the Brookfield Central High School Chorus, Phillip Olson, Director, and the Present Music Ensemble, 2002. To the memory of the victims of the AIDS epidemic, 1980-present.”
First Performance:
Ensemble Version: 23 October 2002 / First Unitarian Society, Madison, Wisconsin / The Brookfield Central High School Chorus / Present Music Ensemble / Phillip Olson
Piano Version: 11 May 2008 / Trinity Lutheran Church, Madison, Wisconsin / Wisconsin Chamber Choir / Robert Gehrenbeck
Publisher: Peermusic Classical
Program Note:
Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his 1918 Pied Beauty, suggested the idea that God may be an Impressionist, creating using tiny dots of color, or stipples. “All things counter, original, spare, strange” refers both to animals’ actions in nature as well as humans’ actions in society. My structural response to Hopkins’ curtal sonnet was a chaconne (a repeated chord progression) that, in its “open-ended” (it ends each time by modulating into a new key) construction, is a musical manifestation of the poem’s sprung paeonic rhythm. The seamless choral fabric carries the hymn to “dappled things” while the instrumental ensemble personifies those things.
Robert Frost, in Gathering Leaves, may have been attempting to symbolize in the endless and elusive autumn task of raking leaves the persistent pursuit of unseen ends or the difficulty of artistic triumphs, but I think he was also affectionately celebrating the pure ritual of activity enjoyed for its own sake. The task seems endless and the gathered leaves slight and valueless, but it is a necessary cleansing rite whose chief goal is preparation for seasonal renewals. I tone painted the emotionally cool elusiveness of the leaves being swept upwards by the breeze in rising whole-tone melodies and tremulous strings, alternating the scene with emotionally warmer homophonic choral settings of what I imagined to be the gatherer’s internal thoughts.
The poem We’re All Here by Charles Sprague serves as frontispiece to the 1843 James Fennimore Cooper novel Wyandotte; or, the Hutted Hill. The poem speaks to love’s ability to conquer loss. I fervently believe that our loved ones never really leave us—not if we keep them close in our hearts. We’re All Here is dedicated to the memory of the victims of the AIDS epidemic, 1980-present. It also pays tribute to the survivors. In my setting of Cooper’s poem, I progressed from a feeling of remembrance and mourning to acceptance and, ultimately to the rapturous spirit of Hopkins’ Pied Beauty.
Commissioned by the Brookfield Central High School Chorus, Phillip Olsen, Director and the Present Music Ensemble, We're All Here was premiered on October 23rd, 2002 at the First Unitarian Society, Madison, Wisconsin.
–Daron Hagen, 2002