Worth the Wait
Year
2020
Length
10'00"
Category
Choral
Orchestration
SATB chorus, flute, Bb clarinet, F horn, piano, strings
Premiere
October 29, 2022
New Hampshire Master Chorale
Program Note
My dear friend and long-time collaborator Meghan Guidry wrote the poem Worth the Wait as a wedding gift for my husband Chris and I, and recited it during our ceremony on June 6, 2015. These words remain deeply close to my heart and I’ve set them to music for the occasion of our fifth anniversary.
Meghan’s poem unfolds with alternating stanzas that recall Chris and my journeys, with allusions to our childhood homes outside of Washington D.C. (Chris) and New York City (Oliver); college years in Ithaca and Hanover; and professional passions as landscape architect and composer. As with all things meant to be, our separate journeys bore seeds of the future, each of us growing into the man we would be on that fateful day we finally met. Before the final stanza, the orchestra quotes music I wrote for our wedding processional, the melody a musical cryptogram carved out of our initials, C-B-O-C.
Beyond the universal aspects of this poem’s love story, I would be remiss if I did not share something about what it means to me to compose this music. Chris and I grew up in a time when there were no visible love songs that depicted the affections between two men or two women. In this arena, potential role models were Ellen and the sitcom characters Will & Grace. Chris and I came of age at a seminal moment in the fight for LGTBQ+ equality, riding the emotional waves of two steps forward, one step back, as society debated the value of the love we would later find together. Matthew Shepard was murdered when I was a junior in high school. In 2000, Vermont became the first state to afford civil protections for same sex unions, the same year I matriculated at Dartmouth College. Driving around the area, I saw “Take Back Vermont” signs on people’s lawns, projecting a message of fear and hate. During my senior year, the Goodridge court decision required Massachusetts to become the first state to legally recognize same-sex marriage. To prevent out-of-state same sex couples from traveling to Massachusetts to get married, Governor Mitt Romney deployed a 1913 law designed to prohibit interracial marriage.
On the day of Chris’s and my wedding, our marriage was recognized in only some states. Finally, on June 26, 2015—three weeks after our wedding— the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges paved the way for marriage equality nationwide. As with all movements for justice, there is still much work to be done. And yet, it is important to take stock of where we are today and celebrate how far we’ve come.
Text by Meghan Guidry
I knew you every spring
when the cherry blossoms bloomed.
Pink petals strewn on marble white.
I knew you in the rhythms
of city grids, footfall symphonies
that swelled on summer nights.
I knew you in the currents
of Cayuga Lake, where willows dipped
to deeper blues like shrines.
I knew you on top of Giles Tower
where starlight sang your name
through red maples and pitch pine.
I knew you every time I held
my hands in the soil and heard
you in the reverberation of the roots.
I knew you in every new melody
taking shape, the fade
of piano keys to quiet truths.
I knew you in every single step.
So when we met,
I had known you forever.
Performance History
- October 30, 2022: New Hampshire Master Chorale, Colonial Theater, Laconia, NH
- October 29, 2022: New Hampshire Master Chorale, Granoff Music Center, Medford, MA
