URGENT EARTH
April 2024 press release:
NYC VOCAL ENSEMBLE TO PRESENT WORLD PREMIERE CANTATA ON THE CLIMATE CRISIS
NEW YORK CITY (April 20, 2024)— A new cantata about the climate crisis, “Urgent Earth,” began over a discussion of tofu. Dining together near Lincoln Center, the groundbreaking feminist composer Stefania de Kenessey and visionary poet and performance artist Annie Finch were lamenting a news article about how even this favored food of the health-conscious is wreaking environmental destruction.
As Finch recalls it, “Stefania was depressed about climate change. I said to her, let’s turn this pain into something useful.” At the restaurant table, they mapped out a cantata—a narrative piece with a long choral tradition that spans sacred and secular concerns.
Their goal was to move listeners from grief about climate change through catharsis to resolution. The music would be unaccompanied, for treble voices. Finch, who often collaborates with composers due to her deeply considered use of poetic meter and rhythm, suggested writing the work for Accord Treble Choir, an NYC-based chamber ensemble of ten singers that had performed one of her previous collaborations (with composer Matthew Harris), “Songs for the Wheel of the Year.”
“Urgent Earth: A Musical Ceremony of Mourning and Rebirth” is a 22-minute vocal cantata that begins with a prologue that draws from Wiccan rituals intended to generate change by shifting energy; audience members are invited to participate in an opening incantation on the repeating lyrics, “Water and fire and air and earth.”
Subsequent movements employ rhythmic and melodic elements from a wide-ranging stylistic and musical palette:
“Oil Spill”—A confrontation of the costs of oil, using syncopated rhythms that evoke ragtime and early 20th century American popular music
“Butterfly Lullaby”—A melodically beautiful meditation in a gentle, swinging compound meter
“Our Mother God”—A declamatory prayer for forgiveness that gives way to a dissonance that conveys urgency and precarity
“Extinction Litany”—A surreal soundscape speaking the names of vanished creatures; this eulogy for the extinct masterfully interweaves whole tone and chromatic scalar movement
“Epilogue”—Recapitulating the opening incantation, the epilogue offers a return to possibility.
Finch speaks of using specific choices of meter and rhythm to help listeners digest difficult emotions. “When we have repressed emotions, it paralyzes us.” She envisioned the progression of movements in Urgent Earth as a way to “process your anger, grief, and frustration so that afterward you will be more free to claim your power and agency to act.”
De Kenessey adds: “I’ve always been of the opinion that art has to reflect the concerns of its time. But it also has to say something other than the obvious. The obvious is that we are in deep trouble when it comes to the climate. To say this is not particularly helpful to people. So, without being saccharine or cloying or unrealistic, I wanted to offer some measure of hope and perhaps to inspire people to do something.”
Liz Geisewite, Accord’s musical director, says of the collaboration: “As a leader in the NYC treble choral music scene and a champion of new choral works, Accord is eager to bring De Kenessey and Finch's Urgent Earth to life. Accord was formed as a collaborative ensemble to celebrate treble voices and make music that inspires with its beauty and profound humanity. This project is the perfect confluence of artistic creation and Accord's founding principles. Through the years, we have been honored to premiere multiple new works for treble choirs written specifically for Accord” [by composers Matthew Harris, John Hetland, Rex Isenberg, and Michael Roberts]. “Urgent Earth is particularly special as it's the first multi-movement work written for Accord by a woman composer, and we are thrilled to be working with the incomparable poet Annie Finch again.”