Carol Barnett: Longing for Home (cycle)
Carol Barnett: Longing for Home (cycle)
Composer: Carol Barnett
Poet: Judah Halevi, Bea Exner Liu, Mohja Kahf, Eugene McCarthy, Alla Renée Bozarth
Voicing: Mezzo-Soprano, Baritone, & Piano
Date: 2018
Duration: 16:00
About: A cycle which focuses on homecoming in various ways – the enduring wish to return to a place remembered with love and longing, as well as the uncertainty, the impossibility of doing so.
Text / Lyrics
I. JERUSALEM (after Halevi)
Beautiful heights, city of a great King,
From the western coast my desire burns towards thee.
Pity and tenderness burst in me, remembering
Thy former glories, thy temple now broken stones.
I wish I could fly to thee on the wings of an eagle
And mingle my tears with thy dust.
I have sought thee, love, though the King is not there
And instead of Gilead’s balm, snakes and scorpions.
Let me fall on thy broken stones and tenderly kiss them—
The taste of thy dust will be sweeter than honey to me.
Trans. Robert Mezey (b. 1935)
II. MOTHER
I wish that I could talk with her again.
That’s what I thought of when I thought of home,
Always supposing I had a home to come to.
If she were here, we’d warm the Chinese pot
To brew a jasmine-scented elixir,
And I would tell her how my life has been—
All the parts that don’t make sense to me,
And she would let me talk until the parts
Fitted together.
That will never be.
She couldn’t wait for me to come to her—
Ten years away. I couldn’t wish for her
To wait, all blind and helpless as she was.
So now I have come home to emptiness:
No silly welcome-rhyme, no happy tears,
No eager questioning. No way to get
An answer to my questions. Silence fills
The rooms that once were vibrant with her song,
And all the things I wanted to talk out
With her are locked forever in my heart.
I wander through the rooms where she is not.
Alone I sit on the hassock by her chair,
And there, at last, I seem to hear her voice:
“You’re a big girl now. You can work things out.”
Bea Exner Liu (1907-1997)
III. VOYAGER DUST
When they arrive in the new country,
voyagers carry it on their shoulders,
the dusting of the sky they left behind.
The woman on the bus in the downy sweater,
I could smell it in her clothes.
It was voyager’s dust from China.
It lay in the foreign stitching of her placket.
It said: We will meet again in Beijing,
in Guangzhou. We will meet again.
My mother had voyager’s dust in her scarves.
I imagine her a new student like this woman on the bus,
getting home, shaking out the clothes from her suitcase,
hanging up, one by one, the garments from the old country.
On washing day my mother would unroll her scarves.
She’d hold one end, my brother or I the other,
and we’d stretch the wet georgette and shake it out.
We’d dash, my brother or I, under the canopy,
its soft spray on our faces like the ash
of debris after the destruction of a city,
its citizen driven out across the earth.
We never knew
it was voyager dust. It said:
We will meet again in Damascus,
in Aleppo. We will meet again.
It was Syria in her scarves.
We never knew it.
Now it is on our shoulders too.
Mohja Kahf (b. 1967)
IV. LETTER TO MARIANNE MOORE
(in tribute to Joseph Grucci)
Come quickly to your city.
All the boats at the piers
are quiet, waiting for you.
Only their flags and pennants move
and those gently as tongues whispering
you down from the sky.
The horns and whistles all are silent,
so that you can hear our softer call.
The Staten Island Ferry leaves no wake.
All the waters are still
mirrors waiting for your face.
If another looks, they erase
with quick ripples and regret.
The bridges are bowed,
waiting, and the tunnels call.
The gargoyles hold their stern faces,
but like children waiting to open
presents, threaten to smile.
The lions at the library, one can see
in peripheral vision, twitch their tails,
eager to follow you down the street.
We have promised them your coming
to quiet them.
Everyone knows that there are brown butter-
flies in your hair, and agates
and small mirrors in your purse
and words.
Come quickly to your city.
Eugene McCarthy (1916-2005)
V. DANCING TOWARD THE PROMISED LAND
I, Miriam, took my tambourine
and finger cymbals with me
out of the land of slavery
with its daily insults and petty
exemptions, and so remain always
ready to dance on the long, long journey,
dance at every victory, beginning with
surviving the Passover, then the strange
occurrence when the Red Sea dried beneath
our feet as we ran, safely passing over the narrow
strip onto the Sinai Peninsula, all the way out
from the land of longing toward the storied memory of Home.
I danced to the song that spilled out of me,
loud up to Heaven, rejoicing on hopeful feet,
rejoicing with arms flying through warm air like wings.
God knows it may take a long time to return.
It’s been five hundred years, after all.
A long time gone, but our stories keep it alive
in our hearts. I wonder if I’ll live to see it from
the mountains across River Jordan. I wonder
if I’ll be an old woman, and dance down
the side of Mt. Nebo with arms wide open,
heart fluttering strong, leading the way
with cymbals and songs into the Promised Land.
This poem is in the unpublished book, My Blessed Misfortunes, by Alla Renée Bozarth,
Copyright 2011. All rights reserved.
Source Notes
Longing for Home was commissioned part of Source Song Festival’s 5th anniversary. It was premiered on August 5th, 2018 at Westminster Hall in Minneapolis, MN by Clara Osowski, mezzo-soprano, Alan Dunbar, bass-baritone, & Mary Jo Gothmann, pianist.
Performer Notes
These songs are really fantastic— each one a little gem unto itself! I was honored to play them and to get to work with Carol— hearing her insights and suggestions made this a great experience for me! -MJG
It's a lovely cycle about our different memories of home, and if only a mezzo performs these, I believe it's possible to assemble a nice 3-song cycle with just movements II, III, and V. -CO
II. Mother - M. 50-53 take out of time, then re-establish a squarer tempo in 54. This is the part of the piece that becomes an inner focus and it's important to be exactly together (tricky after all the meter shifts). I think the tempo needs to slow slightly at 66 - it doesn't lose any perceived tempo, since the singer has such an active melodic line. The ending line can be played either way - resolute or filled with grief or... it's really up to the duo's interpretation. -CO
III. Voyager Dust - This middle section is an ear worm, but I think is the most vivid texts. It requires strict and very accurate rhythm from singer and pianist and enormous trust in each other, but Carol successfully brings the rhythms out using the very detailed rhythm. Trust Carol. M. 75 - the "sh" is a bright and light "sh", barely audible. Personally, it was my favorite to perform of the five. -CO
V. Dancing toward the promised land - The hardest task for the pianist in the cycle, the atmosphere needs to be created by every possible color in the keyboard in just four bars. Take this opening at the edge of being out of control - the slowest tempo is the one that's marked, but no faster than what is possible to get the words across. M. 41 after air, take a breath. The piece ends pretty abruptly, so I suggest aiming your focus and intention to M. 60 when you begin to dance again - try to signal to the audience that it's about over when the cymbals return so they're not taken off-guard at the ending being abrupt. -CO
Composer Info
Carol Barnett’s music has been called audacious and engaging. Her varied catalog includes works for solo voice, piano, chorus, diverse chamber ensembles, orchestra, and wind ensemble.
She has received grants and fellowships from the Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France (1991), the Inter-University Research Committee on Cyprus (1999), the Jerome Foundation (2002), and the McKnight Foundation (2005). In 2003 she was awarded the Nancy Van de Vate International Prize for Opera for her chamber opera, Snow, and her music theater work Meeting at Seneca Falls was featured at the 2006 Diversity Festival in Red Wing, MN. The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass, commissioned in 2006 by VocalEssence and written with Marisha Chamberlain, had its Carnegie Hall debut in February 2013, and has become a favorite across the country. Recent works include My People Are Rising, for Elektra Women’s Choir; Longing for Home, a song cycle for Source Song Festival; and Will’s Ladies, a Shakespeare cycle for mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski and the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra.
Barnett is a charter member of the American Composers Forum and a graduate of the University of Minnesota, where she studied composition with Dominick Argento and Paul Fetler. She was composer-in-residence with the Dale Warland Singers from 1992 to 2001, and a member of the adjunct faculty at Augsburg College from 2000 to 2015.
Further information is available at www.carolbarnett.net
Poet Info
Physician, poet and philosopher Judah Halevi was born in Spain, in 1075 or 1086, and died in 1141 shortly after arriving in the Holy Land. He is considered one of the greatest Hebrew poets, celebrated both for his religious and his secular works, many of which appear in present-day Jewish liturgy. American poet and academic Robert Mezey is also a noted translator. He was born in Philadelphia and attended Kenyon College, the University of Iowa, and Stanford University. He has held various teaching positions and retired in 1999 after 23 years at Pomona College. He currently resides in Maryland.
Bea Exner Liu was born and raised in Northfield, Minnesota, and graduated from Carleton College. She moved to China in 1935 to teach English, since teaching positions were scarce in the United States during the Depression. While there, she married a Chinese classmate from Carleton, and witnessed the Japanese invasion of China during the years 1935 to 1945. The eventuality of a Communist takeover finally brought Liu and her family back to Minnesota. She later published an award-winning children's book as well as her memoir, Remembering China, 1935–1945.
Syrian-American poet, novelist, and professor Mohja Kahf emigrated to the United States with her family in 1971. She graduated from Douglass College in 1988, and later received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Rutgers. Since 1995, she has taught at the University of Arkansas.
Eugene Joseph McCarthy (1916-2005) was an American politician, poet, and long-time Congressman from Minnesota. He took up writing poetry in the 1960s, and his increased political prominence led to increased interest in his published works. "If any of you are secret poets, the best way to break into print is to run for the presidency", he wrote in 1968.
Poet and prose writer Alla Reneé Bozarth was among the first eleven women ordained as Episcopal priests in 1974. She has over forty years of professional experience as a soul caregiver—soul-mending as a psychotherapist, and soul-tending as a spiritual director.