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Paul John Rudoi
PJR Music (Paul John Rudoi)
America Will Be! (SATB)
A theatrical work that focuses on the importance of listening, learning, and changing from those often forgotten around us.
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America Will Be!
SATB a cappella
America Will Be! is a theatrical work based on Langston Hughes’ eye-opening “Let America Be Amer-ica Again,” focusing on the importance of listening, learning, and changing from those often forgotten around us. Set as a journey through complacency, confrontation, realization, acceptance, and ac-tion, audiences and choirs alike will find hope within Hughes’ statements alongside Paul John Rudoi’s passionate setting.
Composer’s Notes
America Will Be! is a theatrical work split into three sections. The first is meant to be a fanfare while ignoring those who are often forgotten in society. Make sure to have the choir “interrupt” the soloist throughout this section. Section two, beginning at m30, is a confrontation between the majority and minority involving a gradual realization, first with individual soloists and later with the tutti entrance, of our common ground. Artistic liberties on movement or focus points are encouraged. The final section, beginning at m74, is a return to the fanfare but with determination to make a change.
– Paul John Rudoi
Text
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed –
Let it be the great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me)
O, let my land be a land where
Liberty is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the (black man) bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek
I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong,
so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, (red man’s), (black man’s), ME—
O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
– Langston Hughes
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