What makes us truly feel at home? Join us as VOX explores the meaning of home in a concert that features a new commission from composer Andrea Clearfield, music from the Romantic-era composer Clara Schumann, as well as a feel-good pieces like "Home" from the hit musical The Wiz. Make yourself "at home” with VOX for an evening of wonderful music!

At the end of the 1929 MGM musical The Wizard of Oz, reunited with her Kansas family and friends in her old familiar room, Dorothy joyfully exclaims ”there’s no place like home!” Herbert Stothart’s score underlines the moment with an instrumental quote of the familiar 1823 American song “Home, Sweet Home” (“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home…”). Dorothy’s fantastical journey through the Land of Oz taught her to approach her troubles with courage and maturity, and her connection to home upon her return is enriched and renewed. The Wizard of Oz is one well-known narrative about departing from and returning to a home; tonight’s concert explores a variety of perspectives - drawn from literature, art, folk wisdom, philosophy, and popular song - on what home means. In “Always Coming Home”, Joan Szymko sets text from Ursula Le Guin’s ethnographic, post-apocalyptic novel Always Coming Home. Much like the journey of world-building that unfolds in the novel, Szymko’s setting is a musical-lyrical journey: initially hesitant, then growing into an openness to the potential of experiencing new things. That leaving home to travel can bring something positive for your senses to experience, and you can still embrace this experience while always keeping a mindfulness of home. Clara Wieck was a child of musicians. A child prodigy on the piano, she made her concert debut in 1828, at the age of 9. She started touring Europe at age 11 (with her domineering father micromanaging her career), and was one of the first pianists to perform from memory – a convention that is now standard in concert performance. Against her father’s wishes, she married composer Robert Schumann in 1840 and composed these passionate love songs soon thereafter. Listen to how piano and voice complement each other in these pieces – remember Clara Schumann was a pianist! - and think about how she writes the piano part to tell the story along with the voice. The vocals sing of longing, tears, woodland beauty – can you hear how the piano also works to express this imagery? A new commission for Vox, Andrea Clearfield’s Home in Me ruminates upon the theme of finding home. While trekking to a remote region of the Himalaya to research and help document Tibetan folk music, Andrea Clearfield and poet Sienna Craig developed an interest in “migration, diaspora and questions about the nature of home. In Home in Me, they contemplate these experiences through the experience of the body, and how we resonate with our surroundings in seeking where we belong. Some singers will perform the piece with small stones in hand that they were charged to gather from a place that feels like home, playing them as percussion instruments. The third movement was recently completed and addresses the connection of heart and mind as essential to our humanity. In “The Peace of Wild Things”, composer Sean Ivory sets a meditative poem by Wendell Berry that reflects upon the act of seeking peace and finding refuge from the fear of transience through the beauty of nature. Cello and piano offer sparse counterpoint to the worrying voices, gradually growing in intensity to peak with a twinkling of stars, offering the hope that we can find a moment’s worth of grace and freedom in the presence of wild things. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” is an African American spiritual with origins in the 19th century. The lyric trope of crossing a significant River appears as a reference to Biblical imagery—the River Jordan – and also used as a metaphor for an escape into freedom. It was first recorded by the Fisk University Jubilee Quartet in 1909. The larger group, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, was organized in 1871 to tour America and Europe with choral arrangements of spirituals as a fundraiser for Fisk University, a historically Black university. In 2014, Vox commissioned “We Are Home” from composer Jenni Brandon. Members of Vox participated in the creation of this piece by offering descriptions of what Vox meant to them. As an expression of a community made up of many different voices, the piece has a recurring musical motif: the energetic repetition of “we are” that builds in texture, layering voices from lowest to highest, only ever ending when voices are at their zenith of strength: in unity. “Always Keep This Close” breathes with the life that a beloved community can bring – your soul is happy to be surrounded by those you love, and the sense of belonging carries you through times when you are apart: “even when you leave this does not leave you.” Colleen Carhuff’s poetry is a deeply personal portrait of community in microcosm: her experience of singing in a choir. Zachary J. Moore’s cinematic setting of these words exudes the easy and familiar joy of a community that has learned to sing together, and through that work of learning, have found more than just song. The Wiz, a retelling of The Wizard of Oz from a contemporary African American point of view, premiered on Broadway in 1975 to great acclaim. At the end of The Wiz, Dorothy bids farewell to the dear friends she has made on her journey through Oz with the song “Home.” Though she is returning home to Kansas and Aunt Em, she has learned that through loyalty, friendship, and love, the feeling of home can be created anywhere. - Holley Replogle-Wong, Ph.D.