Wherever You Are
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PDF score of Wherever You Are for voice & piano, music by Lisa Neher, poetry by Marlanda Dekine
Co-commissioned for FUSE: Collaborations in Song by Catalyst New Music and Boston Singers’ Resource. Written for Addison Pattillo, soprano and Brendon Shapiro, pianist.
Length: 10 minutes
Vocal range: (ossia A#3) B3 - A5
For additional transpositions, contact me.
Program NoteWherever You Are explores complexity and how the people and places around us are never just one thing. A loving, effusive grandparent to their grandchildren was a strict disciplinarian to their own children. A beautiful, cherished landscape was the site of colonialism and violence. How can we be honest about our own culpability and complicity in the unjust systems we were born into? How do we hold multiple truths with clear eyes and forge a way forward with hope and love?
Wherever You Are was co-commissioned for FUSE: Collaborations in Song by Catalyst New Music and Boston Singers’ Resource and was written for Addison Pattillo, soprano and Brendon Shapiro, pianist. |
PoemWherever You Are
by Marlanda Dekine Bruised as a hydrangea’s ear turned toward summer’s sun, I feel a war begin in my mouth. The love I have for women I call my sisters never left. I see their faces and remember their knives. I hear a “hello, child” in my dreams from my father’s father, whose whippings lash into my present. I shut my mouth to find a cure inside my tongue. Have you ever prayed for someone you’ve never met? Even the morning glories are hurting, no better than me. May these blue words hold me. I am seeking the grace of river water. I want the magic of my grandma’s hands, stirring field peas to make our family new. I want to say I am her reaped thing. /// What am I, if not guilty, living in an empire where fields of blood made me. I can mute you with the press of a button. I smell gunsmoke and eat apple pie. I watch warplanes that never stopped singing destruction. My life bound up with yours, who, what, and wherever you are. I am a part of the machine that destroys us wild things. We are precious and guilty. And the weeds still bloom purple as when my grandma was still a girl. And the river remembered where it used to flow every time it floods. And the live oaks have watched us repeating ourselves. Oh, beloved, the live oaks have watched. |