The Harbor
TTTTBBBB choir
(2018)

Text: Carl Sandburg, “The Harbor” (1878-1967)
Language: English
Duration: 10 minutes

Premiered May 2018
Constellation Men’s Ensemble
Evanston IL

Composer’s Note

My favorite place in Chicago is on the concrete path that wraps around the Planetarium, a juxtaposition of edges in itself; man-made cement keeps Lake Michigan from overflowing into a place that teaches us about the stars. The Harbor is born out of the line between the reality of the city and the possibility of the nature. Having lived in Chicago for six years, I spent much of my time on that edge, both literally as I stole time from my graduate and postdoctoral work for hours on the lakefront, and figuratively as I felt an internal pull between Chicago’s consistent pressure to progress in my career and the restorative joy of standing still and breathing in the natural world on the Lakeshore Path.

The piece itself explores spectra of time, from marked to fluid: language, from consonants and vowels to full phrases: and ensemble, from individual arrhythmic polyphony to walls of unified voices. It begins and ends with swirling ambiguity, leading toward little crests of alignment before fracturing back into individual pathways. In the middle, a lens slowly zooms into focus, and it is at the edge of Sandburg’s descriptions of the city and the lake that everything locks in musically. Once the step into the language of nature is taken, the spectra begin to unravel again, losing stability, but with a markedly different affect from the way the piece began.

Text

Passing through huddled and ugly walls,?
By doorways where women haggard
Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
Out from the huddled and ugly walls,
I came sudden, at the city’s edge,
On a blue burst of lake,
Long lake waves breaking under the sun
On a spray-flung curve of shore;
And a fluttering storm of gulls,
Masses of great gray wings
And flying white bellies
Veering and wheeling free in the open.

-Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)