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About the Composer
Jocelyn Hagen
JH Music (Jocelyn Hagen)
We Make It Home
Embracing resilience, connection, and hope even in the face of loss and change.
SATB div. choir and piano
“We Make it Home” offers a meditation on the meaning of home. Through rich harmonies and expressive phrasing, the music embraces themes of resilience, belonging, and shared humanity. Even in the face of loss and change, the piece affirms that home can be found in memory, in connection, and in the hope we carry forward.
Composer’s Notes
In “We Make It Home,” Minnesota-based composer Jocelyn Hagen reflects on home not as a fixed structure, but as a way of living attentively within the world. The poem unfolds as a kind of inventory of what surrounds the space of home, gathering its meaning through accumulation. Hagen’s music mirrors this gentle persistence through a nearly continuous alternation between 5/4 and 6/4 meters—a rhythmic pattern listeners may never consciously register until it finally changes, the piano drops away, and the choir sings “dream us into being,” as if a long-named hope has finally come to life. What emerges after that moment is an affirmation that home endures not only in places we inhabit, but in the care we choose to extend to one another.
-Joshua Shank
Text
Home
this square of light
this stretch of trail
this sidewalk
this bed, this room.
Hope in what I’m seeing Is
home.
This morning comes in pinks and golds,
brings this renaissance blue day,
this satellite-filled sky,
this dappled light, this star-filled night,
this home.
This idea; this philosophy,
this line, this curve, this thought,
we voice, this belief
in each other, in this place,
that we never lose hope.
A home
this wind
this tree, this lightning,
these sparks and shadows flee
temporal and ancient, dream
us into being.
Even after the roof is gone,
the barn, on its knees.
the flood water rising,
the chainsaws, the no longer trees.
Our memories are a home.
This is what I hope
for you, for me
that we are learning, are leaning
into who we are, free
to live what we feel inside,
in this world in need of our care.
in our hands, what we love.
in our hearts, how to live.
Wherever we are,
wherever we are going,
that we make it home.
-Julia Klatt Singer
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