FELLOW CITIZENS

ABOUT THE ALBUM

We live in an extraordinary time in the history of human migration. According to the UNHCR, global forced displacement has doubled over the last decade, with more than 120 million people forcibly displaced in 2024 alone. The effects of climate change are expected to accelerate those trends.

As American artists, we come to this subject through a question that has shaped our national identity since before the country's founding 250 years ago: is the United States truly “a nation of immigrants,” or is it “America for Americans”? The same tensions reverberate at the center of political debate worldwide, from Washington and London to Berlin, Tokyo, Ankara, Nairobi, and New Delhi.

Song offers a natural place to sit with that question. The wanderer has been central to the repertoire from the troubadours, through Schubert and Mahler, to today's itinerant singer-songwriters. Song's fusion of words and music lets us hold contradiction and complexity rather than collapse them into a binary. Rather than argue, it invites us to listen to the human experiences caught between opposing views of who belongs and how we welcome them.

The program is organized around a constellation of questions. What does it mean to leave one's home? What do we carry when we uproot a life? What is it to be turned away when seeking refuge? How are we received when the journey ends? Songs by Franz Schubert, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Errollyn Wallen trace the journey itself. Folk-song arrangements by Béla Bartók, Antonín Dvořák, and Steven Mark Kohn gather the songs we carried. Ruth Crawford Seeger's Chinaman, Laundryman and Mohammed Fairouz's setting of W. H. Auden's Refugee Blues confront how newcomers are received, and refused.

At the heart of the album is the world-premiere recording of Shawn Okpebholo's The Beautiful, a cycle setting poems by Margaret Noodin, Carl Sandburg, Claude McKay, and Tsitsi Jaji that asks who our fellow citizens are as Americans. The album is framed by composers who themselves migrated. It opens with Irving Berlin's setting of Emma Lazarus's Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor; Berlin arrived at Ellis Island as a child fleeing Russian pogroms. It also includes songs by Florence Price and Robert Owens, who followed the path of the Great Migration. It closes with Eric Malmquist's setting of Sandburg's Fellow Citizens, in which an impoverished Italian immigrant guitar-maker near Hull House turns out to be the only Chicagoan the poet envies.

The question of what home really means will continue to be debated and politicized for decades to come. This album is an attempt to center human experience in that conversation, and to invite empathy and compassion to hold a primary place in it.

‍ ‍– Nicholas Phan