Composers notes on “For the Earth” For the Earth was written in in the. Spring of 2021. At the time, all rehearsals were being held remotely, not an ideal for a performing ensemble. Lehigh University Choir had done a project in the fall of 2020 entitled “There’s No Place Like Home, ” which explored our feelings of family and
community in a time of Covid.

In the spring of 2021, we thought to expand our sense of community and consider what the students thought to be the most pressing global issues affecting them. While many important issues were raised, the one the students kept returning to was environmental sustainability.

We were fortunate to have a collaborative workshop with the Boston-based social acitivist choir, Voices 21 c, under the leadership of André de Quadros. André, along with Krystal Morin, Bradford Dumont, Judith Zuckerman were particularly helpful in creating the improvised speaking choruses that punctuate the musical settings in For the Earth. The recording we created was a collaborative effort by members of the Lehigh University Choir and Voices21C sending in sound samples to be woven into the initial recording of the work. I am forever grateful to the
indefatigable Luis Morales, who helped in so much of the assemblage of the thousands of sound samples that were edited to make the recording.

For the story of For the Earth, students at Lehigh created a narrative set in a dystopian future when the earth has been enveloped by a thick yellow cloud, permanently despoiling the atmosphere and natural resources. The character of The Elder, a scientist who tried to warn of the coming calamity but was not heard, is telling a group of children in a shelter the story of The Before Time. As the students imaged this, even in this dystopian future, there are those who live in relative comfort, and deny climate change.

My response to the story made me think of one of the more dramatic forms in the choral tradition, the Passion. Passion stories normally tell the story of Christ being crucified, and how the world does not respond to a figure who represents good, electing torture and turning its back. The elements of the Passion – an Evangelist (The Elder), chorales that speak for humanity, arias that express personal responses, and turba (crowd) reactions (here, the chorus of deniers) all came together in For the Earth. The final chorus, like the last chorus of Bach’s passion settings, is at once a lament and a conclusion to the story as far as we can tell it now.