Alive Poems is available for SSAATTBB choir with orchestra and SSAATTBB choir with chamber orchestra. The instrumentation for these two versions is:

• Full orchestra: 2 fl (2 = picc), ob, eh, 2 cl, 2 bsn, 2 hn, 2 tpt, 2 perc, hp, strings

• Chamber orchestra: fl (= picc), ob, cl, bsn, hn, tpt, perc, pno, strings

To order the full score and parts of either version, please contact the composer at scott@scott-perkins.com.

Program Notes

Commissioned by the Hartford Chorale in Connecticut in celebration of its 50th anniversary, Alive Poems: Stories of Our American Heritage recognizes, draws attention to, and celebrates, the backgrounds of some of the many peoples who form the fabric of our country. This diversity is exemplified in the racial makeup of the people of Hartford: when this piece was written, its population was 44.3% Hispanic or Latino, 37.7% Black or African American, 14.8% non-Hispanic/Latino White, 2.7% Asian, and 0.5% Indigenous American. Just over six percent identified as being of multiple races.

The immigrant is the central character in this story, and perhaps no poem would seem more fitting than Emma Lazarus’s iconic “The New Colossus.” This poem is best known for its being inscribed on a bronze plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty, the monument—still undergoing construction at the time—for which the poem was written. Passengers en route to Ellis Island, which accepted nearly half of all immigrants between 1886 and 1930, passed by the statue as they completed their long journey from Europe. “The New Colossus” has become a symbol of the promise awaiting immigrants who arrived in the United States by sea.

But this promise has not awaited every immigrant; neither does the poem reflect every immigrant’s experience, nor even the general experience of every immigrant group. In fact, it was not meant to: Lazarus penned the poem one year after the passage of the first general immigration law, the Immigration Act of 1882. Under this act, the government taxed anyone who attempted to immigrate to the United States, resulting in corruption and abuse, and it blocked classes of people it deemed undesirable. The same year, 1882, saw the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first and, to date, only law to ban all people of a certain ethnicity from immigrating to the country. Lazarus, an activist who worked to provide aid to refugees, wrote “The New Colossus” as an act of defiance against US immigration policy. The poem is, and always has been, aspirational and not representational.

Indeed, the descendants of America’s European colonists have a long and troubling past when it comes to their treatment of those arbitrarily designated as outsiders. This is to say nothing of their role in the forced immigration of hundreds of thousands of African slaves, nor of the deadly effects of their colonization of the lands of Indigenous Americans. Alive Poems tells the stories of the European immigrant arriving by sea in New York; the Chinese immigrant arriving by sea in California; the Mexican immigrant struggling to find an identity after leaving behind their home to seek hospitality from their neighbors to the north; the Indigenous American who tells stories to keep alive the memory of those who gave up their homes and their lives to invaders; and the descendent of slaves who triumphs over centuries of oppression.

Yee of Toishan, whose identity beyond a family name and homeland is unknown, was one of approximately 175,000 Chinese immigrant-hopefuls detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay between 1910 and 1940. These detentions lasted between a few days and nearly two years; contemporary Ellis Island immigrant-hopefuls were usually admitted within one day, by contrast, because they were not subject to racist immigration policies. Conditions in the Angel Island Immigration Station were miserable, unsanitary, and unsafe. To cope with these conditions, many detainees, including Yee of Toishan, carved poems into the walls of the facility. These poems express feelings of isolation, sadness, fear, and even anger. Chinese-American scholar-poet Genny Lim transcribed and translated these inscriptions into English, many of which have been published. In the first movement of Alive Poems, Lazarus’s ode is set as flowing, lyrical lines that culminate in majestic, triumphant fanfares reminiscent of stereotypical Americana language. Without a pause after the fanfare, we hear a pulsing timpano and low strings underpinning Yee’s words of grief, bitterness, and loneliness. The melody is a dark variation on that of a section of “The New Colossus,” heard just minutes earlier: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Thus, Yee’s words—the words of a tired, poor, huddled person in captivity on America’s shore—act as a solemn, sobering, and ironic response: this firsthand account of the truth of many would-be-immigrants’ experiences captures the true intention behind Lazarus’s oft-misunderstood poem.

Despite being one of the largest non-native groups in the United States, Mexican immigrants face systemic discrimination, poverty, and occupational exploitation. Struggling with the acceptance of their cultural heritage in their home, many Mexican Americans have experienced an identity crisis. The queer, feminist poet Gloria Anzaldúa writes about her experience as a mestiza—a woman of both indigenous and Spanish descent—who grew up on the Mexico–Texas border. In “La Conciencia de la Mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness,” a chapter from her best-known book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa celebrates the nature of her mestizaje (morphogenesis) as a type of evolution. The musical setting illustrates this duality by splitting the twelve notes of the octave into various groups of opposing but related notes: at times, the first six notes of the F-sharp major scale are juxtaposed with the first six notes of the C major scale; at other times, the two whole-tone scales are juxtaposed with each other. These pairs sometimes alternate, and sometimes mix to form new groups in a kind of “musical evolution.”

The tragic fate of America’s indigenous peoples through deceit, displacement, and murder at the hands of colonists is the subject of Laguna Pueblo-American writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s “The Storyteller’s Escape,” from her acclaimed collection of poems and short stories called Storyteller. In this poem, an old woman explains how she tells “escape stories” as a means of survival, preserving through her words the memory of not only those who escape danger, but also those who do not: “In this way / we hold them / and keep them with us forever / and in this way / we continue.” The music is simple and gentle, with a very tender and poignant postlude.

Over 300,000 slaves were taken from their homes and brought to America’s shores against their will. The aftermath of this barbarism continues for many African Americans today in systemic injustice and inequity, disproportionate incarceration, acts of brutality from those sworn to protect them, murder, and many other atrocities. They are a tragic part of our country’s story. In “Still I Rise,” African-American poet-activist Maya Angelou speaks of a Black woman boldly and proudly triumphing over those who would see her beaten down, oppressed, and humiliated. Seven of the final fifteen lines of the poem are simply the words “I rise.” Each time the choir sings these two powerful words, the top sopranos leap to higher and higher notes, culminating in an explosion of sound from the orchestra. Even then, the music continues, gradually spinning out of control and breaking free of all restraints: tonality disintegrates, rhythm notation vanishes, and the piccolo—the highest of the woodwinds—rockets up to the top of its range. The strings have the final word, sustaining a chord that grows louder and louder until they can give no more.

No matter what our story is, we cannot deny that where we come from defines in large part who we are. Alive Poems ends with “Remember,” in which Muscogee-American Poet Laureate Joy Harjo entreats us to reflect on where we were born, our parents, nature, and all that surrounds us, and to note that everything—including us—is constantly evolving: “all is in motion, is growing, is you.” The entire movement is underpinned by a simple, repeating chord progression, introduced by a solo harp. The sopranos and altos enter, trading off fragments of text to an accompaniment of harp and just five string instruments. The tenors and basses take over, and more instruments enter to grow towards a small climax. After a short but tender interlude of harp and solo cello, a gradual crescendo begins with the addition of instruments, an increase in volume, an expansion of range, and a thickening of texture. At its climax, the choir and full orchestra play layers upon layers of overlapping melodies under a soaring descant and sparkling bells. This postlude summarizes and unifies the entire work by binding together and celebrating the American consciousness through the stories of the native, the immigrant, and the slave.

—Scott Perkins