Great Trees
Year
2021
Length
7'00"
Category
Choral
Orchestration
SATB Chorus a capella
Commission
New Hampshire Master Chorale
Premiere
June 19, 2021
New Hampshire Master Chorale
Dan Perkins, Music Director
Program Note
Worldwide, over 6 million people have died from the COVID-19 pandemic. Each soul lost has their own story of love, laughter and tears. They were raindrops, rippling to form waves; gusts of wind rustling through leaves of grass; and great trees, wise sentinels of our forests. Dr. Maya Angelou’s powerful poem “When Great Trees Fall” reminds us that we are made better by those who have touched our hearts. I set her words to music as an elegy for each of the countless, beloved souls we have lost to this terrible disease. May they live on through us.
Poetry by Maya Angelou
When great trees fall,
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.
Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
Performance History
- October 30, 2022: New Hampshire Master Chorale, Colonial Theater, Laconia, NH
- October 29, 2022: New Hampshire Master Chorale, Granoff Music Center at Tufts University, Medford, MA
- September 4, 2022: Voces Caelestium Arts Ensemble, The Great Hall, Camperdown, Sydney, Australia
- June 20, 2021: New Hampshire Master Chorale, Riverfront Park, Plymouth, NH
- June 19, 2021: New Hampshire Master Chorale, Riverfront Park, Plymouth, NH
