SATURDAY, MARCH 15TH (TROUTDALE | REYNOLDS H.S.)

7:00pm - House Opens

7:30pm - Peformance begins
(105 minutes with one 15-minute intermission)

9:30pm - End of Performance

SUNDAY, MARCH 16TH (BEAVERTON | RESER CENTER)

2:30 pm - Doors open

3:00 pm - Show begins
(105 minutes with one 15-minute intermission)

5:00pm - End of program

The Crossing commissioned To the Hands as a response to Ad manus from Dieterich Buxtehude’s 17th century masterpiece, Membra Jesu Nostri. To the Hands begins inside the 17th century sound of Buxtehude. It expands and colors and breaks this language, as the piece’s core considerations, of the suffering of those around the world seeking refuge, and of our role and responsibility in these global and local crises, gradually come into focus. The prelude turns the tune of Ad manus into a wordless plainchant melody, punctured later by the strings’ introduction of an unsettling pattern. 

The second movement fragments Buxtehude’s choral setting of the central question, “quid sunt plagae istae in medio manuum tuarum,” or “what are these wounds in the midst of your hands.” It settles finally on an inversion of the question, so that we reflect, “What are these wounds in the midst of our hands?” We notice what may have been done to us, but we also question what we have done and what our role has been in these wounds we see before us.

The text that follows in the third movement is a riff on Emma Lazarus’ sonnet The New Colossus, famous for its engraving at the base of the Statue of Liberty. The poem’s lines “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and its reference to the statue’s “beacon-hand” present a very different image of a hand — one that is open, beckoning, and strong. No wounds are to be found there — only comfort for those caught in a dangerous and complex environment.

While third movement operates in broad strokes from a distance, the fourth zooms in on the map so far that we see the intimate scene of an old woman in her home, maybe setting the table for dinner alone. Who is she, where has she been, whose lives has she left? This simple image melts into a meditation on the words in caverna from the Song of Solomon, found in Buxtehude’s fourth section, Ad latus.

In the fifth movement the harmony is passed around from one string instrument to another, overlapping only briefly, while numerical figures are spoken by the choir. These are global figures of internally displaced persons, by country, sourced from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) data reported in May 2015 (accessed on 20/03/2016 at www.internal-displacement.org). Sometimes data is the cruelest and most honest poetry. The sixth and final movement unfolds the words in caverna into the tumbling and comforting promise of “ever ever” — “ever ever will I hold you, ever ever will I enfold you”. They could be the words of Christ, or of a parent or friend or lover, or even of a nation.

—from program notes by Caroline Shaw

Margaret Bond’s Credo is her setting of the ever-intrepid pan-Africanist sociologist and reformer W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963). The text (1904, rev. 1920) – one of the first political and social-justice manifestos committed to print by a Black American – stands with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “I Have a Dream” speech as one of the most influential racial-justice documents of the twentieth century. It not only condemns war as murder and oppression and imperialism as “devilish,” but also affirms, for a world in which – then as now – Black lives are viewed in some quarters as less than others, the inherent beauty and dignity of Blackness, the importance of racial equality.

Most importantly, it declares that the quest for racial justice and global equality is mandated by God himself. Margaret Bonds, a deeply religious lifelong-champion of social justice in all its forms, poured herself into setting this manifesto to music in 1964-66, creating an extended composition of extraordinary power and beauty. That composition was premiered with the composer at the piano in 1967 and received one other complete performance during Bonds’s lifetime, but remained unpublished until 2020, when Hildegard Publishing released the first edition of both the orchestral version and the piano-vocal version.

When the poet’s widow, Shirley Graham Du Bois, attended the first complete posthumous performance she labeled the event “one of the most moving moments of [her] life” and described Bonds’s Credo as “a work of art that is eternal – that will live as long as people love each other and really believe in brotherhood.”

In a 1965 letter to Shirley Graham Du Bois, Bonds looked “forward to a time when ‘Credo’ will move all over the world” – and indeed, those present will surely agree that these words and this music are, to put it simply, for now.

–adapted from program notes by John Michael Cooper

World War I decimated a generation of Vaughan Williams’s friends and countrymen. Dona Nobis Pacem was composed for the Huddersfield Choral Society in 1936, but the central movement (“Dirge for Two Veterans”) actually dates from the opening of the prior war, in 1914. The anguished cries that open the work set a scene of pure foreboding, and are a chilling reminder of past wartime suffering. The structure and style of the work was deeply influential, “anticipat[ing] by twenty-five years Britten’s method in the War Requiem of interpolating English poems into the Latin Mass, in his case Whitman.”

Walt Whitman shared with Vaughan Williams not only a firsthand view of the “seething hell” of war but the view that art should be a public act. His monumental Civil War cycles attempted to transfigure an entire nation’s response to a conflict where victory could only be achieved through fratricide. In Specimen Days (1892), Whitman gives this fascinating account of the war’s opening: “News of the attack on Fort Sumter and the flag at Charleston harbor, S. C., was received in New York City late at night (13th April, 1861) and was immediately sent out in extras of the newspapers. I had been to the opera in Fourteenth Street that night, and after the performance was walking down Broadway toward twelve o’clock, on my way to Brooklyn, when I heard in the distance the loud cries of the newsboys, who came presently tearing and yelling up the street, rushing from side to side even more furiously than usual. I bought an extra and cross’d to the Metropolitan Hotel (Niblo’s Garden) [at Broadway and Prince Street] where the great lamps were still brightly blazing, and, with a crowd of others, who gathered impromptu, read the news, which was evidently authentic.” During a moonlit stroll, right after he rounded the bend in Broadway in front of Grace Church, the poet’s life was changed forever.

Vaughan Williams “claimed he was the only man ever to set to music words spoken in the House of Commons.” For his maiden speech, he chose lines from the Quaker MP John Bright, one of the foremost progressives in nineteenth-century Britain. He opposed British aid to the slave-owning Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War, argued for reform of the Poor Laws and Britain’s rotten electoral system, advocated for Indian independence after the 1857 Sepoy uprising, and throughout his career denounced war —especially optional war—as the creature of a “tax-eating class” of politicians. Bright spoke these words on the floor of the House on February 23, 1855 in rejoinder to Britain’s entry into the Crimean War. On hearing them, the silvertongued orator Benjamin Disraeli wrote, “I would give all that I ever had to have delivered that speech.”

Adapting biblical poetry as only he could, Vaughan Williams closes the work with images of reunification, renewal and hope—the calm after the storm. The composer follows the baritone soloist’s beneficent words with a groundswell of four themes, rising up first from the basses and cellos, then violas, second violins, first violins. The choir takes up each theme in turn, starting with the basses (“Nation shall not lift up a sword against nation”), then the tenors (“And none shall make them afraid”), altos (“Mercy and truth are met together”) and finally sopranos (“Truth shall spring out of the earth”), as the listener is literally lifted up out of the depths of war and despair. The gathered voices erupt in acclamation as the orchestra dons its most celebratory colors; festive instruments held in reserve until this moment—chimes, tambourine, triangle, glockenspiel—join in the fun. The music drives to an inspiring climax on the words “good-will toward men.” The opening supplication for peace is granted in a prayerful valediction from the soprano soloist and a cappella chorus. In Vaughan Williams’s hands, the language of music is made every bit as eloquent as the poetic texts that inspired him.

-adapted from program notes by The Choral Society of Grace Church in New York

This weekend we are joined by Immigration Counseling Service (ICS).

Established in 1978, Immigration Counseling Service (ICS) is Oregon’s oldest independent nonprofit immigration law firm, with offices in Hood River and Portland, as well as monthly legal clinics in Central Oregon and the Willamette Valley.

Their mission is to achieve equity and justice for immigrants and their families by providing accessible services to uphold their legal rights. What began as a grassroots effort was championed and nurtured by long-time immigrant advocate, Margaret Godfrey. Over the years, ICS has provided legal assistance to many thousands of individuals from more than 100 countries around the world. ICS carries on Margaret’s legacy, remaining dedicated to ensuring that anyone with an immigration matter has a place to come for help.

RESONANCE ENSEMBLE

ORCHESTRA NOVA NORTHWEST