SONG IN A FRACTURED WORLD
This is my program note for Art Song Chicago’s 2025 Collaborative Works Festival: Songs of War & Peace, which occurs in Chicago from September 4-6, 2025.
Each day, our newsfeeds are filled with stories of conflict in our increasingly polarized world. The very technology meant to bring us closer together now often seems to be driving us apart. Social media’s algorithms, rather than fostering genuine connection, feed on division, amplifying outrage, and eroding empathy. As these societal rifts widen, the Internet relentlessly delivers images and videos of violence spilling into the real world, forcing us to confront the human toll in real time.
For centuries, composers and poets have used words and music to bear witness to the cost of war — to document tragedy and loss, to remind us of our shared humanity, and to hold fast to the hope of lasting peace. While I cannot claim that art song alone holds the keys to world peace, a lifetime devoted to the art of Song has certainly made a pacifist out of me.
As Art Song Chicago opens its 15th season with this festival, in a moment when multiple wars rage across the globe and claim untold innocent lives, this year’s theme feels both urgent and necessary. In an age when we are increasingly drawn into the online realm, song offers a space for real-world communion — a shared meditation on the human stories behind the headlines. It can humanize political narratives, rekindle compassion, and help us find the ever-elusive “common ground.”
This year’s Collaborative Works Festival unfolds over two evenings, simply titled War and Peace. War confronts the realities of conflict head-on, from Charles Ives’s ironically rousing “He Is There!” to the tragic narratives of soldiers portrayed by Robert Schumann, Gustav Mahler, and Kurt Weill. Nico Muhly’s song cycle The Last Letter lends voice to World War I correspondence between soldiers and the loved ones they left behind. The civilian toll is brought into sharp focus in Benjamin Britten’s Still Falls the Rain, where raindrops become metaphors for the bombs devastating London during the Blitz; in Claude Debussy’s furious final composition, Noël des enfants qui n'ont plus de maison, which gives voice to orphan children in the wake of World War I; in Henri Duparc’s Au pays où se fait la guerre, which captures the anxiety of a woman uncertain she will ever see her soldier lover again; and in Nadia Boulanger’s Soir d’hiver, which depicts the anxious vigil of mothers whose husbands are dying at the front. Errollyn Wallen’s haunting setting of Vera Brittain’s poem Roundel uses two voices to illuminate both the immense grief of survivors and the lingering presence of those slain. Together, these works give voice to soldiers, civilians, and witnesses whose lives are indelibly marked by violence.
Peace offers the counterpoint — music that leans toward reconciliation, healing, and hope, while acknowledging peace’s fragility and the care it demands. Richard Parry’s Duet for Heart and Breath, an instrumental work, opens the program in intimate stillness. Schubert’s Frühlingsglaube and Wanderers Nachtlied II find solace in nature’s quiet beauty, while Jake Heggie’s Silence meditates on stillness and grace. Matthew Recio’s Benediction and Amy Beach’s songs express the hope of fresh beginnings, while Olivier Messiaen’s ecstatic Resurrection looks to the triumph of life over death. Prayers for divine aid and the joys of a heavenly afterlife are imagined in songs by Gustav Mahler, Johann Sebastian Bach, and arrangements by Aaron Copland and Damien Geter. Hugo Wolf reminds us that peace, elusive and delicate, lies at the midpoint between pleasure and pain, joy and suffering. The aftermath of war is also examined: Ivor Gurney’s and Gerald Finzi’s songs reflect on the fate of surviving soldiers, while Viet Cuong’s Second Shore — receiving its second-ever performance and the world premiere of a new arrangement for piano, vibraphone, and tenor — tells the deeply personal story of the composer’s parents’ escape from Saigon to the United States during the Vietnam War. In these works, peace is no static ideal, but a living, breathing state that must be continually sustained.
By placing these two evenings side by side, the festival acknowledges that the longing for peace is born from the experience of conflict, and that even in moments of calm, the memory of violence shapes us. Song — in its ability to distill complex emotions into a single breath — offers us a way to listen more deeply: to each other, to our histories, and perhaps even to ourselves.