"Since I left those shores, the wood-choppers have laid them waste. But I remember. I remember..."

These haunting words from Thoreau's "Walden" were written in 1854, but they have lost none of their cautionary power. As we view with alarm the ongoing depletion of our natural resources, Thoreau's timeless meditation on the beauty of nature (and our abuse of it) takes on even greater significance. 

When SACRA/PROFANA’s Artistic Director Juan Carlos Acosta first approached me with the idea for this program last year, our initial concept was to build the concert around pieces that SACRA/PROFANA had sung only once. Having performed an excerpt from Dominick Argento's musical setting of Walden Pond with Art of Élan in 2016, we decided to revisit that piece. But the more I thought about this program, the more I felt that we could make a poignant statement by using Walden Pond as a thematic centerpiece for the program. While still honoring the concept of "Seconds", I began to think about renewable and non-renewable resources; the idea of second chances, but also the awareness that some resources are limited- some things have to be done right the first time. 

With that, I decided to build this program around an ecological theme, without losing the musical idea of "seconds". So all of the pieces on tonight’s program are works that SACRA/PROFANA has done only once- or pieces that I've personally conducted only once (or pieces that have only ever been performed once!) But they also all bring us back, in some way, to the themes of conservation, preservation, stewardship and renewal. 

DeReau Farrar’s exuberant Gospel-tinged arrangement of Carole King’s Way Over Yonder embodies the hopeful spirit of people striving for a better life. Similarly, Stephen Feigenbaum’s haunting setting of Elisa Gonzales’s poem Home paints a picture of individuals grappling with their own darkness- both internal and external. 

Nicole Callihan’s poem The Origin of Birds is a wonderfully reimagining of the creation story- this time with Eve as the protagonist. Evocatively set by Michael Kregler, the piece speaks to humanity’s symbiotic relationship with our winged friends. My own song Rivers & Roads comes from the dance drama SNAKESKIN that I co-created with choreographer John Malashock in 2015. 

Carol Barnett’s setting of the traditional African-American spiritual By & By captures the rhythmic vitality that is so crucial to that genre of music. But an underlying note of resignation- even sorrow- can be heard beneath the vocal interplay. 

I first encountered Kate Wakeling’s wonderful poem Telescope in 2019, in her collection Moon Juice: Poems for Children. The poem immediately captured my imagination, with its clever repeated use of the letter O, and its haunting and dreamy quality, which is somehow eerily whimsical. In my musical setting, I’ve tried to mirror in music what the author created so skillfully in her composition of the poem. Just as the poem “revolves” around the fixed point of the letter O, in my choral setting, I've used the fixed point of a single pitch (in this case, D4), so that the entire harmony revolves around that locus. I think that Telescope, with its repeated pleas of “show me”, is really a metaphor for the secret and solitary discoveries of childhood. 

Singer-songwriter and activist Merrill Garbus is one-half of the pop duo Tune-Yards; their song Water Fountain was an indie hit in 2014. The lyrics are suggestive and at times oblique, but there are some deeper issues at play here: the inequities of global water supplies, human objectification, and the tainted nature of the international currency. The lyrics are challenging and at times disturbing, but the songwriter is clearly addressing these issues in a way that is more satirical than on-the-nose. 

The progressive website thinkprogress.com cites Thoreau as “one of America’s first and most important environmentalists”, noting that Thoreau “laid the foundation for modern-day environmentalism” and “articulated a philosophy based on environmental and social responsibility.” His seminal text Walden was freely adapted by Minnesota-based composer Dominick Argento in 1996 for his 5-movement cycle Walden Pond. 

In Catalogue Raisonné As Memoir: A Composer's Life Argento notes that Walden Pond is one of his favorite choral works (and that many of his friends share this sentiment). The unusual scoring of the harp and three cellos is meant to evoke the shifting nature of water- from the tremulous rippling of the harp to the sensuous depths of the three celli. In his memoir, Argento also mentions his lifelong fascination with bodies of water; clearly that predilection is on display in Walden Pond. 

Argento uses a nostalgic lens through which to view the process of deforestation, so that much of Walden Pond has the cast of a bittersweet memory. Still, there are moments of sheer wonder, as the poet reflects on the magnificence of the natural world. In the first movement, Argento declaims Thoreau’s statement that the pond is “earth’s eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”  This idea takes on profound significance at the end of the piece, when the narrator observes his own reflection in the pond, and whispers: “Walden- is it you?” It’s almost as if Thoreau (through Argento) is suggesting that we are Walden- and that any damage done to the earth is only damage that we do to ourselves. 

I hope you'll find this music as intriguing as I do. As Thoreau writes: "It struck me again tonight: Why, here is Walden- the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago. Where a forest was cut down last winter- another is springing up as lustily as ever." Thoreau is perhaps challenging us to rebound as well: to do better than our past mistakes- to learn from nature, and to leave things better than we found them. 

-  Krishan Oberoi