In the House of Tomorrow
May 3, 2025
Kendra Balmer, Michael Blaakman, Sonja Bontrager, Alan Bush, Iris Chan, Daya Deuskar, Julie Frey, Walker Gosrich, Matt Hall, Amy Hochstetler, Elissa Kranzler, Hank Miller, Erina Pearlstein, Rebekah Reddi, Julie Reust, Joe Rim, Jordan Rock, Melinda Steffy, Brett Watanabe, John Whelchel, Ben Willis, Caroline Winschel, Michele Zuckman
Ysaÿe M. Barnwell, “On Children”
Bobby McFerrin, “The 23rd Psalm”
Juhi Bansal, “Fear (Becoming the Ocean)”
Dale Trumbore, “Flare”
Ēriks Ešenvalds, “Only in Sleep”
Michael Bussewitz-Quarm, “Nigra Sum”
Samo Vovk, “Ta na Solbici (And so we dance in Resia)”
Veljo Tormis, “Lauliku lapsepõli”
traditional Japanese arr. Paul Smith, “Edo Lullaby”
Tarik O’Regan, “Turn”
Sarah Quartel, “Sing, my Child”
Ysaÿe M. Barnwell, “We Are . . . “
Notes on the Program
On Children
The earliest published composition of the American composer and educator Dr. Ysaÿe M. Barnwell, “On Children” serves as our opening invocation, with its straightforward, propulsive rhythms and homophonic, gospel-hymn structure. The text, adapted from an excerpt of the Lebanese-American poet Gibran Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, also offers us today’s title, with the titular oracle advising that the souls of children “dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.” Though the excerpted poem is frequently circulated as parenting advice, its delivery within The Prophet is framed more broadly as guidance for all members of the community, along with similarly insightful meditations on friendship, concepts of good and evil, time, and mortality.
Indeed, this is not really––or not only––a concert about children. Though we joked about marking the fifteenth anniversary of the Chestnut Street Singers with a program invoking our teenaged selves, all self-righteous conviction and questionable fashion, we find ourselves instead feeling more centered, buoyed by the choir’s growth since our founding in 2010 and by our ever-deeper understanding of how best to spark life in this endeavor of collaborative music-making. We have been fortunate to find that working together to shape our ideals in real time and learning as we go is both an extraordinary education and one of our highest goals for this ensemble, not only at its founding fifteen years ago but also now at this anniversary.
And so today’s concert, like this ensemble, is about that journey. It is about that commitment to invest in something we cannot control, about learning to trust ourselves along the way, and about––as the mother of one singer characterizes raising children—holding on with an open hand. We are honored not only to be at this point within our own growth but also to use this celebration as a chance to invest in the growth of others, thanks to today’s program benefiting The Attic Youth Center and Juntos, two extraordinary Philadelphia organizations devoted to supporting children and young people in our community.
What Gibran suggests is our shared responsibility for the future may also have inspired Barnwell’s setting and been reflected in the piece’s earliest performance. In November 1980, Sweet Honey in the Rock, the venerable African American a cappella ensemble in which Barnwell performed for many decades, included “On Children” in their Good News concert in Washington, DC, which was recorded live to become the group’s third album. The rest of the 1980 concert included many pieces with more explicit commentary on political and social issues of the day, and it would be easy to interpret “On Children” as an intentional outlier or even a palate cleanser within the program.
Earlier in the concert, however, Sweet Honey founder Bernice Johnson Reagon introduced their title piece with a call-to-action that we see reflected not only in the forward-looking power of Gibran’s verses but also in our intentions today: “It’s good news when you reject things as they are, when you lay down the world as it is and you take on the responsibility of shaping your own way––that’s good news. Everybody talk about spirituals and they say, ‘Oh Lord, Black folks singing about going to heaven!’ No, this message is for you tonight. . . . They don’t say it’s good times, they say good NEWS. It’s hard times when you decide to pick up your own cross. You gon’ catch hell if you don’t do it the way they say do it, but when you lay down the world and shoulder up your cross that’s—” She paused here, inviting that long-ago audience to shout back: “GOOD NEWS!”
The 23rd Psalm
We find Bobby McFerrin’s “The 23rd Psalm,” which he dedicated to his mother, to be equally inviting. Continuing with hymnic homophony, McFerrin offers an unhurried pace, with a speech-like cadence hearkening to the Anglican chant tradition of his religious upbringing. The text, however, offers a subtle but immeasurably powerful shift on tradition, updating the well-trod verses of the Biblical text with feminine pronouns to recast the concept of unconditional love—which can sometimes seem abstract even for the most devout––as that of a mother for her child.
Fear (Becoming the Ocean)
Whether we are anchored in love or fueled by the need to shape our own tomorrows, each of our journeys eventually come to an inflection point, where our wariness of the path ahead halts our progress. Originally from India and Hong Kong, contemporary composer Juhi Bansal cleverly recreates that arc from uncertainty to resolve in “Fear (Becoming the Ocean)”, in which the singers are instructed to move at their own pace, deliberately “smearing” the sound as they slide between pitches, out of sync with one another. The haunting, layered calls of the soprano soloists urge the ensemble onward, both beckoning and contrasting with the shifting choral chords.
The character of the piece grows more triumphant but no less eerie as the text reaches its final proclamation, perhaps suggesting that confronting one’s fear does not eliminate it. That sense of progress despite uncertainty operates on additional levels with this piece: though both the 2023 work and many internet posts attribute the text to Gibran Khalil Gibran, it seems more likely to have been transcribed from Beyond Enlightenment, a series of lectures delivered in the 1980s by Osho (1931–1990), an Indian mystic and the founder of the Rajneesh movement.
Flare
“Flare,” by contemporary American composer Dale Trumbore, offers us a much more intimate––but no less powerful––vision of momentum and ambition. Here, our forward motion is explicitly physical thanks to the structure of Stacy Gnall’s poetry, with the phrase “I am running” serving both as a refrain and a promise. The piece unfolds in bright glimpses that we may recognize from our own childhoods—last summer’s lean-to, the twist-arm game (ouch!)—but finally converges on a longing that many of us carry for all our lives: “big brother, I am catching up to you.”
Only in Sleep
Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds uses lush homophony and a simple, three-stanza text by the American poet Sara Teasdale to bring us fully into a nostalgic mode with “Only in Sleep.” Teasdale’s poem, which recounts dreams of her childhood friends, was published in 1920 as part of a set entitled “Memories” within her larger work, Flame and Shadow. (Incidentally, Flame and Shadow has been a boon to choral ensembles; our most recent Ešenvalds performance, in April 2024, included his setting of Teasdale’s “Stars” from the same volume.) The shimmering, dream-like texture builds upon simple, subtle voicings from the choir, with lilting ornamentation recurring both in the melody line and the plaintive soprano solo.
Nigra Sum
Dedicated “to all refugees throughout the world and all who are lost,” Michael Bussewitz-Quarm’s gently soaring setting of “Nigra Sum” moves us from self-reflection to self-love. Though we were initially drawn to this piece for the ways in which Bussewitz-Quarm’s cascading lines bring new resonance to the familiar text from the Songs of Solomon, the composer’s own journey of self-determination feels equally powerful: in her forties, after a career as a music educator despite chronic physical illness, Bussewitz-Quarm embarked on her lifelong ambition to compose professionally and simultaneously began living publicly as a transgender woman, an identity previously known only to her family and close friends. Today, she is a prize-winning composer whose work engages with pressing social and environmental issues. Her introduction to “Nigra Sum” feels both apt and evergreen: “May you find peace and may this dark winter soon pass.”
Ta na Solbici (And so we dance in Resia)
As Bussewitz-Quarm notes, “some scholars believe the Songs of Solomon come from a Syrian wedding ritual, while others understand it as representing ‘the revival of life in nature.’” Either interpretation lends itself well to contemporary Slovenian composer Samo Vovk’s “Ta na Solbici,” a rollicking, high-energy depiction of a wedding in Resia, an isolated valley community in the Italian Alps with strong linguistic and cultural ties to nearby Slovenia. With jaunty two-against-three rhythms drawn from typical Resian folk refrains, “Ta na Solbici” offers full-body joy, in which the celebration is loud enough to drown out the sounds of the nearby church bell and the local river.
Lauliku lapsepõli
We find embodiment of music in a different mood in Veljo Tormis’s “Lauliku lapsepõli,” originally scored for treble voices and performed here by the full ensemble. Keenly attentive to the importance of folksong in Estonian culture, Tormis has frequently explained his work by averring, “I do not use folksong. It is folk music that uses me.” He serves as a kind of medium for his country’s folk traditions, channeling the traditional regilaul, or runosong, tunes that his people preserved during generations of foreign occupation into spellbinding modern constructions. His setting of “Lauliku lapsepõli” reflects the musical traditions of the piece’s origins in southeastern Estonia, the homeland of the ancient Setu peoples, with the soloist echoed by a lilting second voice to create an unbroken melodic chain. The choir behind them builds to shimmering, almost unearthly chords evoking the natural forces—the heath, the summerbird—named in the text as the keepers of “many songs.”
Edo Lullaby
“Edo Lullaby,” a traditional Japanese cradle song arranged here by British composer and conductor Paul Smith, crafts a more tender folk lullaby referencing a child’s introduction to music. Originating in Edo, the city now known as Tokyo, likely between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the tune soothes a child to sleep with promises of the souvenirs he has received from his nurse after her recent journey: a toy drum and a wooden flute. The pentatonic melody, which is foundational to many Japanese folk tunes, feels haunting in its unanswered question: we do not know whether the child’s caregiver is back to stay or gone forever.
Turn
By contrast, Tarik O’Regan’s “Turn,” which sets an English translation of a poem by the Dutch writer Albert Verwey, seems to revel in the unanswered question: “O that I could without knowing for centuries / Turn within the ungrasped radiating rose.” O’Regan was prompted to write the piece after being struck by portrait of Verwey, and that cycle of creation begetting creation is reflected in the composer’s own comments on the work: he describes discovering the original poem, which “starts with this concept of a spark without a goal, and I’ve always thought of the creative arts that way: in the very best sense, there is no real purpose––that’s what makes them so magical. The piece is a sort of sense of perpetual motion, sparks of inspiration and what we do as artists flying through the air without going in any particular direction, certainly, to begin with, but . . . perpetual movement from beginning to end.”
Sing, my Child
And how can we emerge from that cycle, especially when it sometimes seems preferable to simply hover without the burden of commitment and care? Well, if a musical pep talk works for you, try Sarah Quartel’s “Sing, my Child”: the dance-like melody, set mostly in 7/8-time with accompanying percussion, urges us forward with sunny, forward-looking encouragement. The hymn-like interjections acknowledge that troubles and worry are inevitable, giving greater credence to the closing prayer for peace.
We Are . . .
We close with a return to the works of Dr. Ysaÿe Maria Barnwell, who composed both the music and the text for “We Are . . .” The poetry reckons with the heritage and promise carried in “each child that’s born.” That depth is echoed in the vocal lines, with the voices drawing upon West African percussion traditions to create a rhythmic conversation and swell. At its peak, the piece is densely textured with competing lines of poetry and percussion, but it narrows at the conclusion to reaffirm both today’s premise and our promise for tomorrow: “For each child that’s born, a morning star rises and sings to the universe who we are.”
Notes by Caroline Winschel