Program Note:

I first discovered Jennifer Chang’s poetry shortly after the world shut down in 2020 and approached her about setting her poems to song in 2021. Due to many delays and cancellations, the work never came to be. Like many people during lockdown, I found myself doing a fair amount of soul-searching and questioning my own values. At the time, I felt like there was this tectonic social shift happening. Fast forward to 2023, I finally have an opportunity to set this poem, but I feel ambivalent about how much has changed, both myself and the world.

Using nature as a locus, Chang’s book The History of Anonymity explores identity and authenticity, while blurring the line between the internal and external self. The title piece of this collection, the poem that I am setting, tackles the vastness and mystery of the ocean. The interaction of these seaside landscapes and the speaker’s identity are often ambiguous and lead to more questions than answers. Sprawling across ten pages, I have divided the text into eight sections to create a song cycle from a single poem. Revisiting Chang’s poems after two years has given me a newfound perspective on her words, and they resonate even more heavily than they did when I first read them.