Jake Runestad, Ritual

Laney Mitchell, soprano soloist

Kevin McGill, piano

DJ Esselburn & Ian Weil, percussion

Composer’s Note: Ritual is a rhythmically-driving sonic narrative that uses a created language for colorful timbral effects.  The title alludes to societal rituals that persist for the sake of tradition, but necessitate deeper reflection and reconsideration.  The drums and chorus rage with a gritty intensity, while a lone soloist offers a softer, more thoughtful perspective. Despite the soloist’s attempt at change, their voice is ultimately overtaken by the power of tradition and the chorus and drums drown out any alternative perspective.

Jeffrey Derus, I Will Go

Malika Brower, violin

Composer’s Note: “I Will Go” speaks to anyone curious about how powerful love, nature, and the divine are. In everyday life we often stop to wonder how something happens with no explanation. That pull towards someone when we fall in love, the intuition nature has in navigating the wild, and the everlasting question of… what is the meaning of life? The SATB chorus offers the narrative of these questions as the solo violin takes the form of the guide or the unknown wisdom. The lasting impression is the profound feeling of awe and wonder. We may never know the answer to why there is such beauty in our world, but we have the chance to live within that beauty.

Text:

I will go wherever you go and live wherever you live.
Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.
I will die where you die and be buried there.

There are three things that amaze me–
no, four things that I do not understand:
How an eagle glides through the sky,
How a snake slithers on a rock,
How a ship navigates the ocean,
How a man loves a woman.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me to know,
Too great, for me to know!

Text from Ruth 1:16-17, Proverbs 30: 18-19, Psalm 139:6

 

Saunder Choi, A Journey of Your Own

Composer’s Note: As I reflected on the the idea of home for a City called Heaven, I realized January 2022 will mark 10 years since I left Manila for the US, in pursuit of music, education, and even liberation from the environment I grew up in. The idea of home as a physical location has dissolved and transformed into something else — a community, a family you’re born into or one that you’ve chosen. I now feel at home in Los Angeles, amongst friends and loved ones, as I once did in Manila, amongst family. For this reason, I invited two poets to collaborate with on this project, one from an old home and one from my new. Joey Vargas and I met as choristers in the Philippine Madrigal Singers. He is one of the most gifted writers and theater artists back in the Philippines. Brian and I met when I was a grad student at USC, and collaborated on some art songs. He is now a published author and the poet laureate of West Hollywood, and an Academy of American Poets fellow. Each of us shared a place, a story, overlapping in intertwining convergence in our individual journeys. Whatever your story is, wherever your journey leads, may it be of your own choosing — always leading with love and courage.

Text:

Look up, call everywhere heaven,
a journey’s a name you can claim as your own.
Journey on, & keep crossing oceans
— an ocean’s a mirror: no happy hereafter,
just the here that you’ve sown.
A journey of your own.

Journey on, & keep crossing oceans
— an ocean’s a mirror. Search for somewhere to name as your own. Look ahead,
call everywhere heaven: no happy hereafter, just the here that you’ve grown.
A journey of your own.

-Brian Sonia-Wallace

~~~

ang lahat ay paroroon at paririto

tungo sa kung saan
patungo, sa dulo;
ang paglalakbay ay paghahanap,
paghahanap ng hangganan —

paghahanap ng hangganan
ng paglalakbay, ng paghahanap;
pagdating sa dulo: muli,
ang lahat ay paroroon at paririto.

-Joey Vargas

(translation)

every one comes and goes
going to wherever
one goes, to the end;
the journey is a search,
a search for a destination —

a search for a destination
of the journey, of the search;
reaching the end: again,
every one comes and goes.

Sydney Guillaume, Ay’bobo Pou Yo

B. Michael Perry, tenor soloist

DJ Esselburn & Ian Weil, percussion

Poètes et musiciens, acteurs, chanteurs et farandoles,
Artistes de partout, venez sous la Coupole.
Venez! En avant! Ay’bobo pou yo, n’ap honore yo!
Les rideaux sont ouverts et la scène est en liesse;
Coryphée, entonnez un beau chant d'allégresse!
“Mèsi, ayibobo pou tout konpozitè yo!
Mèsi, ayibobo pou direktè yo tou!”
Depi solèy leve jouk nan labrin di swa,
Y’ap simen kè kontan, y’ap simaye lapè.
Ils sèment dans nos cœur la joie de l’harmonie,
Le sens de la mesure et le goût de la vie.
Pou bèl misyon sa yo, n’ap di ayibobo pou yo!
La musique et l’amour à jamais nous éclaire,
Et le monde partout resplendit de lumière.
Limyè la jistis, limyè lamitye,
Limyè la dignite, limyè limanite.
Ala yon bèl bagay lè kè tout moun kontan!
Mizik avèk lanmou se pi bèl eritaj!
Mèsi, ay’bobo pou yo! Bravo pou yo!
-Gabriel T. Guillaume
Octobre 2019

Poets and musicians, actors, singers and farandoles,
Artists from everywhere, gather under the Dome.
Join in! Let’s go! We are honoring them!
The curtains are open and the scene is full of jubilation;
Corypheus, intone a marvelous chant!
“Praise and honor to all composers!
Praise and honor to the conductors too!”
From the crack of dawn till the darkness of night,
They are spreading joy and they are sowing peace.
They plant in our hearts the joy of harmony,
The meaning of the bar and the taste of life.
For their beautiful mission, we honor them!
Music and love forever enlighten us,
And the light shines brightly throughout the world.
The light of justice, the light of friendship,
The light of dignity and the light of humanity.
Oh how wonderful it is when everyone’s heart is filled with joy!
Music and love are the best legacy!
We thank and honor them! Bravo for them!

Katerina Gimon, Fire from Elements

Christina Worchester, Karli Christ, & Giovanni Castiglione, callers

Ian Weil, percussion

Composer’s Note: Elements is set of choral works that abstractly depict the four classical elements and explores the wide range of capabilities of the human voice - from overtone singing, to vocal percussion, to colorful vocal timbres. Elements features no 'text' (at least not in the traditional sense), rather a series of syllables generated through improvisation meant to evoke the sound and energy of each element.

Fire is a fun, lively, and energetic work incorporating vocal percussion, body percussion, nasal singing, calls, nonsense syllables, as well as optional percussion.

Rorem - Songs of Sadness

"These eight poems by four poets, two dead and two quick, combine to form a brief life-story, mainly about loss: loss of childhood and snow, of love and idols, and of our planet’s forests. The authors may not feel this common thread; but for me, the ever-searching song-composer, their poems together provide a needed singability while speaking to my current condition of sadness. (I had just finished a jolly cycle when I began this piece. My catalog over the years seems built on contrasting pairs, sad alternating with merry, infinitely.)

Like all song-writers, who are really cannibals, I depend on these bards whose work is finished long before musicians show up to change it, despite itself, into music. But the interaction is crucial, we need to go on. 'We all have reasons for moving,’ says Mark Strand. 'I move/to keep things whole.'" - Ned Rorem, 1994

1.  "How Can I Sing..."

How can I sing when I haven't the heart, or the hope
That something of paradise persists in my song,
That a touch of those long afternoons of summer

Flowing with golden greens under the sky's unbroken blue
Will find a home in yet another imagined place?
Will someone be there to play the viola, someone from whom

The sad tunes still matter? And after I go, as I must,
And come back through the hourglass, will I have proved
That I live against time, that the silk of the songs

I sang is not lost? Or will I have proved that whatever I love
Is unbearable, that the views of Lethe will never
Improve, that whatever I sing is a blank?

3. "Strike Churl"

Strike, churl, hurl, cheerless wind, then; heltering hail
May's beauty massacre and wisped wild clouds grow
Out on the giant air; tell Summer No,
Bid joy back, have at the harvest, keep hope pale.

4. "Open the Door To Me, O"
O, open the door some pity to show,
If love it may be, O!
Tho' thou hast been false, I'll ever prove true-
O, open the doors to me, O!

Cauld is the blast upon my pale cheek,
But caulder thy love for me, O!
The frost that freezes the life at my heart
Is not to my pains frae thee, O!

The wan noon sets behind the white wave,
And Time is setting with me, O!
False Friends, false love, faerwell for mair
I'll ne'er trouble them nor thee, O!

She has opened the door, she has opened it wide,
she sees the pale corse on the plain, O,
"My true love," she cried, and sank down by his side,
Never to rise again, O!

5. "A Mother's Lament"
Fate gave the word - the arrow sped,
And pierc's my darling's heart,
And with him all the joys are fled
Life can to me impart.
By cruel hands the sapling drops,
In dust dishonor's laid:
So fell the pride of all my hopes,
My age's future shade.

The mother linnet in the brake
Bewails her ravish'd young:
So I for my lost darling's sake
Lament for the live-day long.
Death, oft I've fear'd thy fatal blow!
Now fond I bare my breast!
O, do thou kindly lay me low
With him I love at rest.

6. "Keeping Things Whole"
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving,
I move
to keep things whole.

8. "Binsey Poplars (Felled 1879)"
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched un leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled,
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled and sandaled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering
weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve ir hew-
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since the country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her
When we hew or delve:
After-corners cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

 

Balter - Orun

Central to the understanding of lifecycles in Ìṣẹ̀ṣe, the Yoruba religion, are the concepts of family and ancestralism. Orun is the invisible dimension where disembodied spirits join their ancestors after their journey in the Ayé (the physical existence). It is at Orun that ancestral wisdom is expanded and empowered, absorbing knowledge gained by the previous physical existences of each family member. This collective ancestral force resides in Ikole Orun, which is commonly associated with the idea of heaven in Christian religions, though not exactly the same. A portion of that ancestral essence might be assigned as the consciousness of a living being (Ori), usually within that same ancestral bloodline (Atunwa), guiding that person towards fulfilling their destiny in the llé Ayé, the place where life occurs.  Orun points towards connectivity and family wisdom. It is both an origin and a destination, the source of our ancestral strength and where the best of our essence will someday empower those who come after us.

Adler - Concerto for Tuba and Orchestra

“There are too few concertos for tuba” remarked Samuel Adler about the composition of his own CONCERTO FOR TUBA AND ORCHESTRA in 2017. Wishing to showcase the instrument’s lyricism and dexterity alike, Adler cast his concerto in three movements, with a substantial cadenza between the second and third. The first movement, Cantillation, is free-flowing and songlike, while the second and third (Scherzo and Finale) are brilliant and virtuosic. The cadenza before the third movement is a display of musicality rather than technical prowess. “I felt I wanted to give the soloist [David Saltzman] another opportunity to emphasize the beauty and [lyricism] of this neglected solo instrument,” says Adler, “a chance to ‘sing’ by himself.”  The Concerto was commissioned by the Toledo Symphony Orchestra for their tubist (and BGSU faculty member) David Saltzman, tonight's soloist.

Mazzoli - Orpheus Undone

Orpheus Undone, an orchestral work commissioned in 2020 by the Chicago Symphony, is an exploration of two brief moments in the Orpheus myth – the moment that Eurydice dies, and the moment that Orpheus decides to follow his lover into the underworld. Constructed of two connected movements, Behold the Machine, O Death and We of Violence, We Endure, this work explores the baffling and surreal stretching of time in moments of trauma or agony. The movement titles come from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and this work uses small fragments of material from my 2019 ballet Orpheus Alive.  -MM

BGSU Collegiate Chorale

Soprano

Emma Clark S2
Maddie Depinet S1
Alyssa Desotell S1
Brittany Izor S1
Aria King S1
Laney Mitchell S1
Olivia Swicegood S2
Kourtney Syrus S2
Cassidy Vanscoy S2
Christina Worchester S2

Alto
Karli Christ A2
Alex Hoffer A1
Alexandra Meade A1
Sara Murray A1
Bella Olzak A2
Zoey Paulus A2
Julia Posadny A1
Phoebe Saboley A2
Ashlyn Slocum A1
Annie Swanson A2

Tenor
Cameron Baker T1
Will Davis T2
Alexander Ebright T2
Noah Elliott T2
Dylan Gheen T1
Alejo Goenaga T2
Ian Keller T1
Ethan Martinez T1
Michael Otts T2
B. Michael Perry T1

Bass
Sean Barry B1
Will Baughman B1
Gio Castiglione B1
Ivan Cobb B2
Stephen Deeter B1
Zac Flasch B2
Zach Sanford B2
Chris Schock B2
Matthew Steele B1
Ian Wisecup B2

Dr. Richard Schnipke, conductor

Kevin McGill, pianist

Will Baughman, graduate assistant

T.H.E. Modern Dance Company - Dom Glover, President & Kerri Wilde, Artistic Director

Marisa Dickens, Megan Kelley, Hannah Kramer, Leslie Madaras, Gina Managhan, Victoria Merchant, Hope Smith, and Kerri Wilde, dancers

T.H.E. (Toledo's Human Experience) Modern Dance Co. was founded in 2017 with a mission to celebrate the human experience through artistic collaboration, professional performance opportunities, and community outreach in the performing arts. The company resides in Toledo, Ohio - a place its co-founders have called home for over 30 years. THE studio includes seasonal performances, classes, and workshops celebrating diverse cultures and dance styles. The company is parent to THE2 - which invites developing artists ages 13-18 to experience pre-professional life in Toledo’s artistic community.