SHELTERING VOICES
Opus. 42
Instrumentation: Symphony Orchestra (2.2.2.2. / 3.2.3.1. /timp + 1 /soprano solo, SSAA choir/strings)
Duration: 20 Minutes
Commissioned By: The Eureka Ensemble
Libretto: Jessica Lynn Suchon
For Sheltering Voices, the Eureka Ensemble and I decided that I should compose a work that would raise awareness of the issue of domestic violence in Boston. We worked with local women’s shelters to build a choir made of anyone who wished to join, and we provided these women with stipends and food, and rehearsals carried out with joy and love and respect. And we listened to their stories. We decided that I should work with poet and women’s rights activist Jessica Lynn Suchon to create a piece of music in five movements that would correspond to the five steps of recovery from abuse. The marvelous soprano Angel Azzarra was brought in to sing the first three movements - the places where the text wasn’t yet joyful and instead told hard truth.
Jessica Lynn Suchon's poetry (here a crown of sonnets) is as painful as it is beautiful, and it was a pleasure to set it while my eyes constantly brimmed with tears – this experience, this process of writing sound alongside her words dove straight into my heart from the very beginning. These moments at times stark, at times unfurling with bouquet upon bouquet of blooming, erupting flora - I'm blessed and honored to be able to bring this piece forth to Jessica, to the Eureka Ensemble, and most importantly to the women whose voices brought these "songs" and these words to life.
During the week of final rehearsals and the performance in May 2018, donations poured in to the women’s shelters we worked with, and in-kind donations were also made in dramatic amounts. Now This News released a documentary on our project just a few months after the premiere, and it went viral, amassing more than a million views in just three days (scroll down to see the video).
perusal score
libretto
i.
How I was draped in every shade of hush
and still. How darkness was a friend who filled
each night with an impossible empty—
Winter: cruel, cold-tipped. Excuse me, please, I
wanted another life and got this one.
Winter: where nothing was given and yet
everything bare and silently vicious,
absence of violence somehow threatened me
more than a fist, a knife under the bed—
all of that festered in quiet, blossomed
in my gut—a virus turning over.
Something was trapped inside me, a little
ghost in tantrum. Dear violent memory,
how’d I ever shuck you from my center?
ii.
Dear violent memory, how can I shuck you
from my center when you were all I had
for so long? I don’t want to remember,
but I shuck the memory from my center.
My whimpers, how I cradled love’s phantom
in my palms like a fragile bird and held
it to my chest so it couldn’t leave me.
I don’t want to remember, but I shuck
the memory from my center and I feel
that there is still a pulse in scar tissue,
life in its thick twisted skin. I slip grief’s
needle from my tongue, I shuck violence from
my center, take inventory: soft, small
gray pearl, ghost from inside the husk of me.
iii.
No longer a gray ghost inside the husk
of me, I take inventory. I praise
the unbruised skin, say grace to the flexing
jaw. In this new world, I open windows,
slather my body with honey and oil.
Lilacs: a shade of violet I do not
fear. There is a garden now, where once there
was a mouth and the garden is sprouting
flushed blossoms and on my tongue, blush chorus
of hydrangeas and each is singing. Am I
singing? Isn’t this how it sounded? Praise
the mouth, praise the tongue, the lips, both before
and after. Look, here I am nightingale.
Here, a song from my lyred, unbridled throat.
iv.
You pull a song from your lyred, unbridled
throat. You unravel this way, and become
so large no one could possibly touch all
of you. We rework the tapestry, thread
one story with another, pull loose knots,
reconcile, smooth threads beneath our soft palms.
We sing. You grow a garden and enshrine
each tender bud. We understand how to
nourish saplings as the flex toward the light,
fledglings spreading wings. Can anything be
feeble that grows or sings or flies?
You forage your voice and all the voices
of women like you and braid them into
a robin’s throat, into a garnet tongue.
v.
Forage robins’ feathers from the grass, braid
them into a garnet tongue. Call this home.
All of these gleaming windows, call them lungs
and they dance. Call them eyes and they let light
inside. Clemency, we wrote you a sad
letter and it came back so we added
more postage. Mercy, thank you for your card.
We’ve been saving spaces for each of you,
feel that? The sheets are still warm. Radiant,
all of it. Dear, sparkling hum of bees— Dear,
Hope— Dear, bustling leaves with your nimble, thin
yawns slipping through dawn’s chiffon light— thank you
for waiting on us, for still shining on
every ravaged body brimming with light.
- Jessica Lynn Suchon
documentary
about the commissioner
Since its debut in spring 2017, the Eureka Ensemble has brought together Boston’s finest young professional musicians to thousands of new and returning patrons.
Our 2018 flagship campaign “Sheltering Voices”, which featured works by female American composers and a choir consisting of women experiencing homelessness, has inspired millions around the world and led to the birth of the Women’s Chorus, a twice-weekly program for women experiencing homelessness and poverty in Boston.
about the poet
Jessica Lynn Suchon is a widely-published writer who has received fellowships and honors from the Aspen Institute, the Academy of American Poets, and the Tennessee Playwrights Studio. Her book scavenger is forthcoming in 2020 from yesyes books. Jessica's full-length play shopgirls made its debut at the Darkhorse Theater in Nashville, Tennessee in December 2019.