Lamenting Earth

Work Overview

Instrumentation: tenor, string quartet, and piano
Premiere: May 30, 2024, performed by Nicholas Phan, Jasper String Quartet, and Myra Huang, in Merkin Hall
Duration: 20 minutes
Commissioned by Kaufman Music Center (high school poetry) and Dominique and Raoul Slavin (O)

Lamenting Earth Text

I. November Blooming
By Sophia Shao

The cherry trees bloomed in November
their puffs soft against a steel sky
The flower crowns I fashioned on every walk felt
ominous, indicative of a spring that would be
brittle and brown
Each bud coaxed out by the
tender caress of an artificial warmth—faux mother earth
soon trembled on its exposed branch
left to the mercy of whipping wind and temperamental weather
Falling into the same category of phenomenon with
premature babies and spoiled surprises
An unwanted deflowering

II. Sorrow Skies
By Montgomery Harkness, Rinoha Isetani, Casey Schopflocher, and Mirabelle Alpher

In the bloody hands of humans burns a splashed flame
Earth metals are scattered around the lifeless corpses on the shore
They’re tormenting cries of the lives that once were
My screams are soundless while I fall into abyss
While other faces waver with haunting cries

I want to embrace the Earth, but will I die in the process?
Love becomes meaningless as passing looms
Death, all around. (But where from?)

(It shouldn’t make sense that the colors of sunsets and sorrow skies look the same
Now harvested with the mistakes humans have bled)

But my body is made of more paranoia than it is water
Because Darwin didn’t account for the glaciers becoming rivers
Flowing people’s gift of destruction
(Now harvested as far as can be seen)

Through the warm embrace of the animals that still fight,
I see the burnt faces of the Earth that I once climbed

What was once green life slowly fades to rot
Up above, the same sorrow skies
(The starts thrum a lonesome tune)
Imagine what humanity would do, if only we traveled above…

III. O
By Claire Wahmanholm

Once there was an opening, an operation: out of which oared the ocean, then oyster and oystercatcher, opal and opal‐crowned tanager. From ornateness came the ornate flycatcher and ornate fruit dove. From oil, the oilbird. O is for opus, the Orphean warblerʹs octaves, the oratorio of orioles. O for the osprey’s ostentation, the owl and its collection of ossicles. In Octoberʹs ochre, the orchard is overgrown with orange and olive, oleander and oxlip. Ovals of dew on the oat grass. O for obsidian, onyx, ore, for boreholes like inverted obelisks. O for the onionʹs concentric Os, observable only when cut, for the opium oozing from the poppyʹs globe only when scored. O for our organs, for the os of the cervix, the double Os of the ovaries plotted on the bodyʹs plane to mark the origin. O is the orbit that cradles the eye. The oculus opens an O to the sky, where the starry outlines of men float like bubbles between us and oblivion. Once there were oarfish, opaleyes, olive flounders. Once the oxbows were not overrun with nitrogen. O for the mussels opening in the oceanʹs oven. O for the rising ozone, the dropping oxygen, for algae overblooming like an omen or an oracle. O Earth, outgunned and outmanned. (O who holds the void inside itself.) O who has made orphans of our hands.

IV. Nature’s melody of death
By Sibel Ayyildiz, Aim Zubex, Alexi Fusina, and Cobid Buckmire

In the end, love unites all.
Without all the death and destruction, we love earth’s true magnificence.
Everyone feels it
Beside the rivers, nature’s quiet scene
soundless, vast, and green
The grasses are blooming with flowers
We walk into the ocean, feeling the cool water and the dry wind

But everyone feels it,
With our cold veins of stone tearing apart all that’s in our path
Seeing the splashed flames scattered across the tall trees,
The swirl of birds making their way recklessly throughout the hurting skies
(Soundless galaxies rage around us, but we standstill, unaware)

Death knocks on our doors
My mom holding onto my body
The fear in my face reflected in her eyes
We try to grasp that we have left in our tight embrace
But now the world we’ve made is just too hard for us to fix;
(Our end is an ominous and eerie concept)
A feeling of paranoia hits me.
I can’t recall the last time I saw the color green
I guess it’s the end.