You Are Who I Love
You Are Who I Love
The Crossing
Donald Nally, conductor
Sunday, March 17, 2023 at 5pm
The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
with Sandbox Percussion
and Matthew Levy, tenor saxophone
PROGRAM
I.
The First Tears (2014) – Ēriks Ešenvalds
Babylon (2018) – Sarah Rimkus
1. A Stranger
II.
You Are Who I Love (2024) – Harold Meltzer
–world premiere–
Commissioned by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting
for The Crossing and Donald Nally.
III.
Babylon – Rimkus
4. Mama
Earth Teach Me Quiet (2013) – Ešenvalds
This concert is made possible through generous gifts from Carol Westfall and an Anonymous donor.
NOTES + TEXTS
The First Tears
music by Ēriks Ešenvalds
words of an Inuit legend
It was Raven who created the World.
One day, Raven was out on the water in his kayak,
When he saw what he thought was an island.
He rowed up to it and tried to land his kayak,
But a huge mouth opened up and swallowed him.
It was not an island at all, but an enormous Whale!
As he went down the Whale’s throat, Raven thought he would die,
But instead he saw the Whale’s ribs around him like ivory columns.
In the distance he could hear a sound,
As if someone was banging on a drum.
He could see a light. A mysterious light.
Raven followed the light and went further inside the Whale,
Where he came to a strange little house.
He peered in through the window,
Then knocked on the door and went inside.
He came into a small room,
and there in the corner sat the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.
“Won’t you marry me and come out into the World with me?”
The girl replied, “I do not belong in the World,
just as you do not belong inside the Whale.
But you can stay and keep me company for a while if you like.
However, I must warn you never to touch my drum or my lamp.”
The girl then stood up and started to dance.
When she danced quickly, the Whale soared through the ocean.
When she danced slowly, the Whale rested gently near the surface.
The girl then stopped dancing and walked straight out the door.
“Where are you going?”
The girl replied, “It’s not important, just a matter of breath and life.”
“Who are you and why do you live inside the Whale?”
The girl replied, “I am the Whale’s soul and my drum is the Whale’s heart. My lamp must never go out or I will die, and there will be nobody to beat my drum. I sing and dance all day and night, and never grow tired.”
But when the girl next left the room, Raven did something dreadful.
He ignored what the girl had said to him.
He touched the lamp.
Raven burnt himself on the lamp, and dropped it on the floor.
It hit the floor, and the flame went out.
The girl fell in through the door and dropped down dead;
The house collapsed and became a pile of dead Whale bones.
Raven suddenly was all alone, inside a mess of blood and fat.
Raven clambered back up the Whale’s throat,
Up through its blowhole, up onto the top of its dead body.
Raven flew higher and higher, far from the sea.
He flew to the earth and sat at the Whale’s side,
And there he wept the first tears the World had ever known.
* * *
Babylon
music by Sarah Rimkus
words from the Sequence for Pentecost, Responsary for Holy Saturday,
Psalm 137, Psalm 23, and folk songs collected by Alan and John Lomax
a note from the composer:
I have always been fascinated by travel and distances. I’ve moved homes a fair amount in my life, as have many of us, and often have the bulk of my creative ideas while moving from place to place in some way or another.
A lot of music throughout history has had a similar fascination – fitting for an art form that is so heavily based on movement through time.
This is even more apparent in American culture, a fragmented culture built by immigrants (voluntary and forced), where so much of our folk music carries themes of journeying and pilgrimage and the solitude and alienation felt along the way.
Babylon takes a selection of these American folk texts and fashions them into a work that uses contemporary musical ways to show that movement and that solitude.
They are supported by sacred texts which carry the same themes, many of which are particular texts, images and stories that have worked their way into American folk music and art as well as the collective cultural consciousness.
My hope is that it uses these themes to create a new musical experience appropriate to their prevalence in the present day.
1. A Stranger
I
I am
I am a–
I
I am
I am a
I am a stranger here.
I am
I am a
I am a stranger everywhere.
O Lord
O Lord I am
O Lord I am a stranger here.
All you who walk by…
All you who walk by on the road…
O Lord I am
O Lord I am a stranger everywhere
Qui transitis per viam…
All you who walk by
on the road…
Look down,
Look down that road
Where you and I must go.
Look down,
Look down that long road
Where you and I must go.
O vos omnes
Qui transitis per viam,
Attendite et videte:
Si est dolor
sicut dolor meus.
I
I am
I am a stranger here.
I am a stranger everywhere.
I would go home, Lord, but I am a stranger there.
I would go home but I am a stranger there.
I am a stranger there.
* * *
You Are Who I Love
music by Harold Meltzer
words by Aracelis Girmay
Commissioned by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting
for The Crossing and Donald Nally
In memory of Lewis Spratlan
a note from the composer:
One night, a little more than ten years ago, I rode the subway south from uptown Manhattan. I was preparing to fly to Italy in three days, go to an artist colony called Civitella Ranieri, and there set some poems to music before I came home. But I hadn't found the poems I wanted to set. I was staring mindlessly at ads on the subway when I saw an amazing entry in the Poetry in Motion series: "Noche de Lluvia, San Salvador" by Aracelis Girmay. I started copying down in my notebook the lines of the poem. By the time I had finished I had long passed the station nearest my home. I had no idea about getting the rights to the poem, but I thought if I don't get them I would have lost only a couple of weeks' work, or I could transform the songs into instrumental duos. I packed the notebook in my travel bag to Italy, flew to Rome, took a bus to Perugia, and was met by Civitella staff who brought me to the colony. I met a dozen Fellows there, one of whom was, incredibly, the poet, Aracelis Girmay. Her home was, naturally enough, in Brooklyn, about three miles away from mine in New York City. She wrote in my notebook that I had the rights to set her poetry.
A few weeks later, back home, I bought a book of Aracelis' poems. Almost immediately I fixated on "You Are Who I Love," although this was a few years before I had an idea to use the poem musically, and years before I was trained to focus on the issues involving undocumented immigrants.
The music is dedicated to the memory of Lewis Spratlan, who, when I was in college, taught me how to compose, and who wrote multiple pieces for The Crossing. I love him more than I can say.
I am grateful to Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting, who commissioned the music for The Crossing and Sandbox Percussion.
You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart
You, in the park, feeding the pigeons
You cheering for the bees
You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats
You protecting the river You are who I love
delivering babies, nursing the sick
You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose
You taking your medicine, reading the magazines
You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.
You dancing in the kitchen, on the sidewalk, in the subway waiting for the train because Stevie Wonder, Héctor Lavoe, La Lupe
You stirring the pot of beans, you, washing your father’s feet
You are who I love, you
reciting Darwish, then June
Feeding your heart, teaching your parents how to do The Dougie, counting to 10, reading your patients’ charts
You are who I love, changing policies, standing in line for water, stocking the food pantries, making a meal
You are who I love, writing letters, calling the senators, you, who, with the seconds of your body (with your time here), arrive on buses, on trains, in cars, by foot to stand in the January streets against the cool and brutal offices, saying: YOUR CRUELTY DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME
You are who I love, you struggling to see
You struggling to love or find a question
You better than me, you kinder and so blistering with anger, you are who I love, standing in the wind, salvaging the umbrellas, graduating from school, wearing holes in your shoes
You are who I love
weeping or touching the faces of the weeping
You, Violeta Parra, grateful for the alphabet, for sound,
singing toward us in the dream
You carrying your brother home
You noticing the butterflies
Sharing your water, sharing your potatoes and greens
You who did and did not survive
You who cleaned the kitchens
You who built the railroad tracks and roads
You who replanted the trees, listening to the work of squirrels and birds,
you are who I love
You whose blood was taken, whose hands and lives were taken, with or without
your saying Yes, I mean to give. You are who I love.
You who the borders crossed
You whose fires
You decent with rage, so in love with the earth
You writing poems alongside children
You cactus, water, sparrow, crow You, my elder
You are who I love,
summoning the courage, making the cobbler,
getting the blood drawn, sharing the difficult news, you always planting the marigolds, learning to walk wherever you are, learning to read wherever you are, you baking the bread, you come to me in dreams, you kissing the faces of your dead wherever you are, speaking to your children in your mother’s languages, tootsing the birds
You are who I love, behind the library desk, leaving who might kill you, crying with the love songs, polishing your shoes, lighting the candles, getting through the first day despite the whisperers sniping fail fail fail
You are who I love, you who beat and did not beat the odds, you who knows that any good thing you have is the result of someone else’s sacrifice, work, you who fights for reparations
You are who I love, you who stands at the courthouse with the sign that reads NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE
You are who I love, singing Leonard Cohen to the snow with glitter on your face, wearing a kilt and violet lipstick
You are who I love, sighing in your sleep
You, playing drums in the procession, feeding the chickens and humming as you hem the skirt, you sharpening the pencil, you writing the poem about the loneliness of the astronaut
You wanting to listen, you trying to be so still
You are who I love, mothering the dogs, standing with horses,
pledging your allegiance to the grass
You in brightness and in darkness, throwing your head back as you laugh, kissing your hand
You carrying the berbere from the mill, and the jug of oil pressed from the olives
of the trees you belong to
You studying stars, you are who I love braiding your child’s hair
You are who I love, crossing the desert and trying to cross the desert
You are who I love, working the shifts to buy books, rice, tomatoes,
bathing your children as you listen to the lecture, heating the kitchen with the oven, up early, up late
You are who I love, learning English, learning Spanish, drawing flowers on your hand with a ballpoint pen, taking the bus home
You are who I love, speaking plainly about your pain, sucking your teeth at the airport terminal television every time the politicians say something that offends your sense of decency, of thought, which is often
You are who I love, throwing your hands up in agony or disbelief, shaking your head, arguing back, out loud or inside of yourself, holding close your incredulity which, yes, too, I love I love
your working heart, how each of its gestures, tiny or big, stand beside my own agony, building a forest there
How "Fuck you" becomes a love song
You carrying the signs, packing the lunches, with the rain on your face
You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of quiet, in the rooms of shouting, in the airport terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each of us looking out from the gorgeous sliver of our lives at all, finding ourselves here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love You are who I love
You and you and you are who
–Copyright © 2017 by Aracelis Girmay. Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.
* * *
Babylon
4. Mama
Mama, make me a garment
And make it long and white and narrow.
Mama, make me a garment
And make it long and white and narrow.
Mama.
The Lord,
The Lord is my shepherd
I shall not want,
I shall not want.
My soul’s gonna shine like a star;
I’m bound to heaven when I die.
My soul’s gonna shine like a star,
Down in the valley one day.
He makes me lie down,
lie down in green pastures,
green pastures.
(In pascuis herbarum aclinavit me.)
Mama, make me a garment
And make it long and white and narrow.
Little bird, little bird,
Come through my window.
He leads me
beside still waters,
still waters.
(Super aquas refectionis enutrivit me.)
My soul’s gonna shine like a star;
I’m bound to heaven when I die.
I’m gonna lay down in that green grass
and look up at the sky,
Down in the valley one day.
Though I walk–
Si ambulavero…
Through the valley
Of the shadow of–
In valle mortis…
Little bird, little bird, if you see my mama
Will you please tell her for me,
Lord, to see that governor –
Tell him to set me free.
I will fear no evil,
For you are with me.
* * *
Earth Teach Me Quiet
music by Ēriks Ešenvalds
words from a Ute (North America) prayer
Earth teach me quiet—as the grasses are still with light.
Earth teach me suffering—as old stones suffer with memory.
Earth teach me humility—as blossoms are humble with beginning.
Earth teach me caring—as mothers nurture their young.
Earth teach me courage—as the tree that stands alone.
Earth teach me limitation—as the ant that crawls on the ground.
Earth teach me freedom—as the eagle that soars in the sky.
Earth teach me acceptance—as the leaves that die each fall.
Earth teach me renewal—as the seed that rises in the spring.
Earth teach me to forget myself—as the melted snow forgets its life.
Earth teach me to remember kindness—as dry fields weep with rain.
SUPPORTERS
We are grateful to those who make The Crossing possible.
Click here to make a gift that supports The Crossing.
TEAM + ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Crossing
Isobel Anthony
Steven Berlanga
Karen Blanchard
Steven Bradshaw
Abigail Chapman
Colin Dill
Micah Dingler
Ryan Fleming
Joanna Gates
Michaël Hudetz
Steven Hyder
Anika Kildegaard
Heidi Kurtz
Kim Leeds
Maren Montalbano
Daniel O'Dea
Olivia Prendergast
Daniel Schwartz
Thann Scoggin
Rebecca Siler
Daniel Spratlan
Elisa Sutherland
Daniel Taylor
Shari Wilson
Sandbox Percussion
Jonny Allen
Ian Rosenbaum
Adam Rosenblatt
Terry Sweeny
Matthew Levy, tenor saxophone
Donald Nally, conductor
Kevin Vondrak, assistant conductor & artistic associate
John Grecia & Lee Hagon-Kerr, collaborative keyboards
Paul Vazquez, sound designer
Shannon McMahon, operations manager
Ben Shively & Christopher LaMountain, production assistants
Elizabeth Dugan, bookkeeper
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