MusicSpoke | Artist Owned Sheet Music™

About the Score

When conductor Matthew Robertson asked me to write a piece centered on immigrant voices, I found myself trying to find a unifying element tying together the diversity of immigrant stories. I read records and ledgers from Ellis and Angel Islands and archival newspaper accounts of why people made dangerous, terrifying journeys to the New World. I read poetry and graffiti from walls of detention centers and speeches from those asserting their basic humanity and right to equal treatment while being denied both by those in power. I thought about my own experiences as an immigrant, the combined fear and hope and uncertainty that drew me forwards to a new place. I realized early in my reading that there really is no unified voice of immigrants. We have come from a hundred different places for an infinite number of individual reasons, united only in our search for hope and a better life. Most of the time, we are many voices –chaotic, distinct, contradictory – but we come together united in our hope, our belief in moving towards something better. This piece pays homage to that strange duality of experience, of being at once individual and distinct voices, but able to sing at the blink of an eye as a single unified, powerful whole. Alongside, it sets the words of First Nations peoples and Americans in reflection of the pluralistic experiences and aspirations of those for whom this has been home.

Texts taken from Ellis Island Archives, with additional fragments by Chief Standing Bear, Khalil Gibran, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Emma Lazarus

In 6 movements, can be excerpted as desired.

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