It Is Happiness (Choral Rehearsal Score)

In 1995, I was invited to create a major work for Aurora Chorus, a then 140-voice women’s ensemble I had recently begun to lead as Artistic Director. As with all my choral works, words come first. And so I went about the careful process of choosing the “perfect” text for my very first choral composition to be accompanied by small orchestra. I kept returning to Mary Oliver’s poems for their powerful beauty and grace; for Oliver’s ability to move me to tears. Her words and images made me feel at home in the world. Even then, I felt disconnected from so much cultural hype and with an accelerating technological incursion that disembodied human communication. So it was with great solace that I turned to the volume: New and Selected Poems— to a woman who considers her one life to be “wild and precious” who “knows how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass… how to feel idle and blessed” —and who asks in her poem “Sunrise,”

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over for all of us?

“It is happiness” she tells us— words I selected as the title of the three-poem choral suite. Oliver later wrote to me: “I like the title it is happiness a lot.” — which meant a lot to me.

I was thrilled when I heard from Mary Oliver again after she received the recording of the premiere performance. In a typewritten note she responded:

Dear Joan Szymko,
Just a note to tell you…that I have been listening to the tape of “It is Happiness” every morning for the past many mornings, in my car, early, on my way to the woods, and it has made me very happy. I like…its tenderness, its lushness, its entrenchment into the text. I like the instruments, what they do, and the surprise that they are there is a pleasant one, I thought it was chorus only. I like the certainty of the melodic line, and the play of it, its circling around.
I like it … altogether.

Thank you, therefore.
Cordially,
Mary Oliver