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
Commercial recording release: Earth Day 2026 (April 22, 2026)
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 bloom in November,
their puffs soft against a steely sky.
The flower crowns I fashion on every walk feel
ominous, promising a brittle, brown spring.
Each bud coaxed forth by the
tender caress of an artificial warmth, faux Mother Earth
soon trembles on her naked branch,
left to the mercy of whipping wind and fickle weather.
Falling out of winter’s fingers and into
wastelands of untimely births,
a pale, forsaken petal sinks.

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

n our bloody hands burns a fatal flame.
Bright metals are scattered around; they carve a scar on the earth.
Tormented cries lament wasted time.
Our screams are hopeless. I fall into the abyss—through runoff, toxic water, historyʹs cries.

I want to caress the Earth, but will I die in its embrace?
Love is not meaningless as ruin looms: death, extinction.

My body is more sorrow than water;
it flows like snowmelt, like glaciers becoming rivers.
It flows, each year faster than the last.
As we fall from grace, I raise my eyes to the sky
to see the burnt sunset of another fiery day.
The once green hillsides slowly drain to white. Ocean levels rise night by night.
Imagine what galaxies would see; imagine our lives from 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. Vast, Green
By Sibel Ayyildiz, Aim Zubex, Alexi Fusina, and Cobid Buckmire

In the end, love unites all.
Despite death and destruction, we love earth’s magnificence. Everyone feels it:
beside the rivers, nature’s quiet scenes
are vast and green.
The grasses bloom with flowers.
We walk into the ocean, feeling the dry wind and cool water.

Everyone feels it—
with our cold veins of stone tearing apart all that’s in our path, seeing the flames scattered across the tall trees,
the birds swirling recklessly throughout the hurting skies.

Death knocks on our doors.
We try to embrace what we have left,
but now the world we’ve broken is too hard to fix.

Sorrow hits us.
We shield our faces, trying to remember
the last time we saw green.