Program note

From the same experiences—consciousness, senses, physical and psychological needs—individuals and societies develop stories to make sense of their world. From the same source come different structures of origin and meaning, and when stories collide, depending on their irreconcilability, there can be combustion. Sometimes the full implications of one story are not clear until it interacts with another.

The title stories, echoes is derived from writer and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s short essay Skywoman Falling:

And then they met—the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve—and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories. They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: “Sister, you got the short end of the stick…”

I. From same, different (11’) shows that meeting of stories. The music in stories, echoes all shares a single source in the stark theme at the work’s beginning—the recurring question of meaningmaking—which appears at pivotal moments in the first movement. Two different ideas respond to the opening statement: the first a glowing embrace; the second a trite, if unsettling, march. These ideas evolve as they encounter each other, one becoming desperate and impassioned; the other becoming monstrous, leaving devastation before returning to the bounds of apparent inconspicuity.

II. Epitaph for the lost (7’) views the cataclysm of the first movement from some remove, giving perspective and space to reflect on and mourn paths not taken—of relationships shattered; of people, land, ecosystems, and ways of living cast aside.

In the emptiness, III. Echoes (6’) tries to chart a cautious new path. Extended solos for soprano and baritone mull over the original question and answers while the ensemble contends with traumas, phantom limbs, and misremembered and over-learned lessons.

stories, echoes reflects that we are in a transformational and, in some ways, cataclysmic time. How things will settle when everything lands is supremely uncertain. What will the new paradigms be? What lessons will we have learned? What scars will we bear? How will we overcorrect? What serendipities might await? stories, echoes is a frame to contend with these questions and our time.