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About the Composer
Paul John Rudoi
PJR Music (Paul John Rudoi)
The Wind’s True Song
Sets a scene in Francisco X. Alarcón’s visceral poem about immigration, shattered dreams, and the potential for change.
SATB Choir and Piano
Commissioned for the Santa Fe Desert Chorale’s 2019 season, The Wind’s True Song sets a scene in Francisco X. Alarcón’s visceral poem about immigration, shattered dreams, and the potential for change. A rewarding challenge for advanced choir, soloists, and piano.
Composer’s Notes
This is not a 3-movement work, but three distinct sections within the voice’s realization narrative:
- Section one involves the experience of coming to shore hoping for something better.
- Section two evokes the moment when one can see the beauty, hope, and potential of the land in which they arrive.
- Section three focuses on the realities and limitations of that land, identifying what can be better, leading again to hope.
All grace notes should be on the beat, not before.
Some tenuto markings indicate stress (e.g. m. 5) and some duration (e.g. m. 6) and are to help clarify syllabic relationships over multiple bars. These should ideally feel organic, not necessarily metrical, focused on how the words might be spoken.
The piano part is often seemingly at odds with the choir, and that is for narrative effect:
- Section 1 should feel inhuman, exact, and without rubato in its imitation of buoys, setting an aural scene of travel.
- Section 2 is connected to the choir, feeling introspection and, at the end, growing frustration with the realities.
From m132 on, the piano is again exact, driving with determined energy contrasting the choir’s ecstatic, flowing beauty.
The following optional suggestions can be used to help the narrative translate more directly to the audience:
- All solos in the first section are different vocalists and assigned from all areas of the choir.
- Begin in a cloud formation (in sections is fine) facing straight out toward the audience, collectively take the “new scenery” in starting around m. 61, and end up facing toward the conductor by m. 80 to the end.
- On the first beat of the piece, immediately start very slowly swaying independently as if rocking on one’s own individual boat. These can gradually dissipate in m. 55 and all should be still by m. 56.
- In m. 132, the choir could process outward into a semi-circle surrounding the front portion of the audience, allowing them to hear the interdependent parts and enveloping them in their message of hope and change.
– Paul John Rudoi
Text
guided by the scent of hope
to even meet up with strangers
and arrive at yesterday and find
ourselves ashore, bathed in future
and to see in every face a door
open and inviting us in
to find solace in memories
like bread and water, a bed, the sun
and spin each experience into a thread,
every moment, every dream, every tear,
and weave the great cloak
of the history of every sigh
and to run out, barefoot, into the year’s
first rains to embrace tenderness,
and offer shade, joy, strength, support like
solid, mountain oaks
and to flourish like tilled soil,
and to be anchor, oar, compass and sea,
and sing the wind’s true song
with one voice, in the face of silence––
we’ll only be free when every man
and woman, in every home, street, every
shade of the human race, everywhere, is truly free
we’ll only be free when the salmon return up wild rivers,
and buffaloes like dark maps roam the open prairies
we’ll only be free when abuse, loneliness, hunger, alienation
aren’t words, but forgotten rumors of a far, distant past
we’ll only be free when we become little boys and girls once again
who squirm with joy as we explore the marvels, the wonders of the world.
– Francisco X. Alarcón
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