Examining what we do at the landmarks of our lives, in the face of loss, grief, and pain, emerging/changed is a love letter to transformation. This program is centered around Arnold Schoenberg’s Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, a monument in the atonal song literature that takes performer and listener on a journey through the suffering of scorned love by way of a murky and violent garden walk. Tania León’s To and Fro sets the scene of this garden—a place of ritualistic metamorphosis, reminding us that the earth’s seasons themselves invite us to embrace constant fluidity. The Nightingale by Vivian Fine reflects on the freedom of this natural world through the eyes of a bird, migrating to distant lands and guided by instinct, further refracted through the words of a person who longs for such liberation but dualistically sees merit in traditional life. Finally, Tomiko Kohjiba’s The Letters of a Portuguese Nun returns us to the pain of a lost love embittered by abandonment, and asks us the question: what happens when someone refuses the opportunity to emerge, changed?

Life offers us many chances to transform ourselves, often triggered by painful experiences and complicated by conflicting emotions. Such experiences lead us to a fork in the road of our lives, giving us the choice to move forward through learning and be rewarded for its strife, or to remain in the past and face the consequences of our refusal to grow. As this program wanders through love and loss, freedom and captivity, and the natural flux of the world around us, it invites the performer and listener to ruminate on their own chances at change—seized or deserted—and the ever-present invitation towards emerging stronger.

emerging/changed is a recital presented by Julia Anne Cordani, a doctoral student in voice performance. With assistance by Kyle Adam Blair, piano, and James Koo, percussion. From the studio of Susan Narucki.