Creation
Her Hands Made the Stars
Composer Jocelyn Hagen returns for the premiere of her visionary new work, “Creation.” Woven from the words of eight women poets, including Emily Dickinson and Hannah Arendt, and with projections that “dance” alongside the score, this immersive piece reimagines the birth of the universe through a feminine lens. In this grounbreaking artistic collaboration, all creative forces that have a hand in this work – from composer to poets, filmmakers to singers – are women!
This concert offers a transcendent experience, inviting the audience to reflect on the interconnection of life, light, and love.
Printable pdf version of the program available HERE!
WELCOME
Dear Friends, Welcome to VOX Femina’s second concert of the 2025-26 season! We are so honored you have joined us today as we gather in community. In a time of continued uncertainty and transition, music offers us a path to connection, solace, and shared hope. In raising our voices together, VOX continues to demonstrate the enduring power of choral music to elevate diverse voices, foster understanding, and promote social change. This season, VOX Femina presents three distinct concerts—each inviting us to engage with big questions, luminous imagination, and the heart of our community. Tonight, we continue our 29th season with Creation: Her Hands Made the Stars, which offers an immersive evening featuring the premiere of "Creation," a visionary new work by Jocelyn Hagen. Woven from the words of eight women poets (including Emily Dickinson and Hannah Arendt), and accompanied by animated projections, Creation reimagines the genesis of the cosmos through a feminine lens. Every aspect of this concert—from composer to poets, filmmakers to singers—is led by women. In June, our season culminates with I, Too, Sing America, a musical journey honoring America’s 250th anniversary. This program brings together voices from across traditions: from Native American poetry and Appalachian folk, to expressions from today’s immigrant communities. Featuring new commissions from composers B.E. Boykin and Carlos Cordero, the concert also includes the treble choir premiere of Washington Women, a work built on female voices across political lines who’ve shaped our nation. I, Too, Sing America encourages reflection on our shared history and a renewed vision for our collective future. Thank you for being part of this season’s journey. Your presence, your listening, and your willingness to engage make VOX Femina’s mission come alive. In each of these concerts, we hope to offer not only music, but space — for reflection, for connection, for renewal. We look forward to seeing you again this season. With deep gratitude,
Dr. Iris S. Levine
Founding Artistic Director
Rebecca Wink
Executive Director
PROGRAM NOTES
Opening the concert this evening, VOX is excited to welcome the Granada Hills Charter High School Concert Choir. Their program brings together three contemporary works that explore sound as a living, breathing force—by turns meditative, evocative, and exuberant. “Be Like the Bird” by Abbie Betinis is a powerful meditation inspired by a short poem by Victor Hugo, examining themes of trust and perseverance. This simple canon creates a sense of stillness and reassurance, inviting the listeners into a moment of quiet reflection. In Evocation, Hye-Young Cho crafts a sound world that feels both ancient and immediate. Rather than following a linear narrative, the music unfolds as a series of sonic impressions, emphasizing color, texture, and resonance, and drawing the listener into an introspective space shaped by memory and imagination. Playful, bold, and rhythmically charged, Jam brings an infectious sense of momentum to the program. Tracy Wong’s writing embraces groove, repetition, and energetic interaction, blurring the lines between composed music and spontaneous play. Interlocking patterns and lively grooves create a dynamic conversation full of surprise and celebrates collaboration and joy in music-making. VOX joins the GHC Concert choir for Elaine Hagenberg’s “Measure Me, Sky!” originally commissioned by the Nashville School of the Arts for the 2023 National American Choral Directors Association Conference. The text comes from a poem by poet and violinist Leonora Speyer (1872-1956) that is full of words that illustrate the embodiment of flight: “Sky, be my depth/Wind, be my width and my height.” Hagenberg paints these words with expansive triplet phrases that are extended through deft hand-offs between higher and lower voices. This energy is matched with triplet figures in the piano that drive the rhythmic charge and soar alongside, creating an uplifting close to this part of the program. --- (Jocelyn’s Notes)
Click HERE for a printable pdf version of these notes.
Creation
Her hands made the stars
Sunday, March 1, 2026 at 7PM
First Congregational Church of Los Angeles
Dr. Iris S. Levine, Founding Artistic Director
Lisa Edwards, Collaborative Pianist
Be Like the Bird
Evocation
Abbie Betinis
Hye-Young Cho
Jam
Tracy Wong
Granada Hills Charter High School Concert Choir
Dr. Desiree Balfour, Conductor
Rachel Wang, Accompanist
Measure Me, Sky!
Elaine Hagenberg
VOX Femina Los Angeles and Granada Hills Charter Concert Choir
Creation
Jocelyn Hagen, composer
Commissioned by VOX Femina Los Angeles and a consortium of ensembles
World Premiere Performance
Part One
If the Beginnings
Silent Symphony
Bloom
Poets
Gretchen E. Henderson
Maria Popova
Emily Dickinson
Part Two
birth
Autumn
What We Love
Mothers
Emory Hall
Kao Kalia Yang
Hannah Arendt
Emory Hall
Part Three
In Any Event
The Cosmos of the Possible
Come sit by my garden
Another Word for Love is Light
Searching for Dark Matter
Dorianne Laux
Maria Popova
Emory Hall
Gretchen E. Henderson
Rebecca Elson
All Information regarding Multimedia, Instrumentalists, etc.
Jocelyn Hagen composes music that has been described as “simply magical” (Fanfare Magazine) and “dramatic and deeply moving” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis/St. Paul). She is a pioneer in the field of composition, pushing the expectations of musicians and audiences with large-scale multimedia works, electro-acoustic music, dance, opera, and publishing. Her first forays into composition were via songwriting, still very evident in her work. The majority of her compositions are for the voice: solo, chamber and choral. Her melodic music is rhythmically driven and texturally complex, rich in color and deeply heartfelt. In 2023 her opera The Song Poet, written with Hmong writer Kao Kalia Yang, premiered with Minnesota Opera, and sold out their run over six months prior to the premiere date.
In 2019 she celebrated the premiere of her multimedia symphony The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, which includes video projections created by a team of visual artists, highlighting da Vinci’s spectacular drawings, inventions, and texts. The work has already been performed over fifty times across the United States, including Canada, Sweden, Croatia, and England. Hagen describes her process of composing for choir, orchestra and film simultaneously in a Tedx Talk given at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, now available on YouTube.
Hagen’s commissions include Voces8, Conspirare, the Minnesota Opera, the Minnesota Orchestra, the International Federation of Choral Music, True Concord Voices and Orchestra, the American Choral Directors Associations of Minnesota, Georgia, Connecticut and Texas, the North Dakota Music Teachers Association, Cantus, the Boston Brass, the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra and the St. Olaf Band, among many others. Her work is independently published through JH Music, as well as through Graphite Publishing, G. Schirmer, EC Schirmer, Fred Bock Music Publishing, Santa Barbara Music Publishing, and Boosey and Hawkes.
Texts
For a printable pdf version, please click HERE
Part One
If the Beginnings
Gretchen E. Henderson
(retold from the perspective of Eve)
In the beginning was an upending of a beginning undone to begin. In the beginning was a transcending of darkness with light, ascending again. In the beginning was an attending to fish, fowl, and fruit seeded to place what had begun to be appalling retold as falling, behind and from grace. And it was so. And so it was. And was it so? At the beginning renounced an ending, the name for “beginning” contended with when the beginning fell to portending, a condescending that would not give in to the beginning that found renaming beginnings as more: intending to mend what began as a story of rending middle from ending, started to bend. And it was so. And was it so? And so it was. If we could fathom a garden of tending more than defending sore borders of words then our anthems could sing beyond tensions compressed as expulsion, pulsing a dirge. If this beginning grew more beginnings, where grace allowed questions as much as faith, what’s still falling might open to loving as more beginnings begin to amaze. Let it be so. So let it be: receding apple, reseed tree.
Silent Symphony
Poet?
Two hundred million years ago, long before we walked the Earth, it was a world of cold blooded creatures and dull color — a kind of terrestrial sea of brown and green. There were plants, but their reproduction was a tenuous game of chance — they released their pollen into the wind, into the water, against the staggering improbability that it might reach another member of their species. No algorithm, no swipe — just chance. But then, in the Cretaceous period, flowers appeared and carpeted the world with astonishing rapidity — because, in some poetic sense, they invented love. Once there were flowers, there were fruit — that transcendent alchemy of sunlight into sugar. Once there were fruit, plants could enlist the help of animals in a kind of trade: sweetness for a lift to a mate. Animals savored the sugars in fruit, converted them into energy and proteins, and a new world of warm blooded mammals came alive. Without flowers, there would be no us. No poetry. No science. No music. And, suddenly, the flower emerges not as this pretty object to be admired, but as this ravishing system of aliveness — a kind of silent symphony of interconnected resilience.
Bloom
Emily Dickinson
Bloom — is Result — to meet a Flower And casually glance Would cause one scarcely to suspect The minor Circumstance Assisting in the Bright Affair So intricately done Then offered as a Butterfly To the Meridian — To pack the Bud — oppose the Worm — Obtain its right of Dew — Adjust the Heat — elude the Wind — Escape the prowling Bee Great Nature not to disappoint Awaiting Her that Day — To be a Flower, is profound Responsibility —
Part TWO
Birth
Emory Hall
you built a life. under ten moons, you were a house of water. you held a second heart in the arms of your rib cage, dreamed two sets of dreams. merged the rivers of your bloodlines under your skin. and then, in the early hours of a spring morning, i watched a piece of you leave, swallowed in the pain of your shattering. you broke, and the rains of new life poured out of you. you are now the mother of that dawning ground. the guardian of its soil. the mender of its aching. the gardener of its joy. this is your work now. you were born in your dying. you were delivered to a new life as you birthed one into existence. you are utter magic. building that mountain.
Autumn
Kao Kalia Young
The baby came…a little boy, mouth opened like a little bird, a version of me, eyes closed, skin translucent. My little boy who weighed nothing in my arms — despite the weight I had felt with him inside of me, the weight of life, the weight of hope, the weight of humanity, the gravity of my little love story — his body was more light than anything else it could have ever been. I looked at autumn, my favorite season, as I had never seen it before, barren, full of bold promises waiting to die. My annual garden, dollar-store pots full of cheerful blooms, my geraniums, marigolds, begonias, impatiens, could continue living, but I didn’t want them to. I stopped watering them. I watched them die. The blooms withered first, then the leaves started drying out in the sun and the strong winds. I thought about watering them in those final days, but my heart was so heavy I could not find the strength. What did a few more days of bloom matter when in the end, we would all die anyway?
What We Love?
Hanna Arendt
We are, in some deep sense, what we love — we become it as much as it becomes us, beckoned from our myriad conscious and unconscious longings, despairs, and patterned desires. A love that seeks anything safe and disposable on earth is constantly frustrated, because everything is doomed to die. Even if things should last, human life does not. We lose it daily. As we live the years pass through us and they wear us out into nothingness. It seems that only the present is real, for “things past and things to come are not”; but how can the present (which I cannot measure) be real since it has no “space”? Life is always either no more or not yet. Like time, life “comes from what is not yet, passes through what is without space, and disappears into what is no longer.” Can life be said to exist at all?
Mothers
Emory Hall
there are millions of mothers that live inside my chest. i speak to them in quiet moments under night skies and in my dreams. we are the keepers of a forest full of hearts. the tenders of its fertile soil the readers of its leaves the guardians of its wild territory. sometimes, we dance together drunk on the perfume of a thousand blossoms of love. sometimes, we rub honey on our ribs, broken from a thousand lifetimes of heartbreak. sometimes, we rest and forget the weight we carry, just for a moment. i meet these mothers in secret but they teach me everything I know.
Part THREE
In Any Event
Dorianne Laux
If we are fractured we are fractured like stars bred to shine in every direction, through any dimension, billions of years since and hence. I shall not lament the human, not yet. There is something more to come, our hearts a gold mine not yet plumbed, an uncharted sea. Nothing is gone forever. If we came from dust and will return to dust then we can find our way into anything. What we are capable of is not yet known, and I praise us now, in advance.
The Cosmos of the possible
Maria Popova
We live our human lives in the lacuna between truth and meaning, between objective reality and subjective sense making laced with feeling. All of our longings, all of our despairs, all of our reckonings with the perplexity of existence are aimed at one or the other. In the aiming is what we call creativity, how we contact beauty — the beauty of a theorem, the beauty of a sonnet.
Come sit by my garden
Emory Hall
let my gardens speak for me when i am gone. let them speak in colored whispers of all the beauty I have seen. and felt. and lived. let them speak of how much death had to find me; how many hard seasons it took to make me a living, breathing thing. let them speak of my seasons of growth and abundance, but let them also tell of my seasons of loss and decay. let the soft, wet earth be a reminder of hardness that didn’t win. of sadness that didn’t calcify. of surrender that triumphed over resistance. and let the glorious, fragrant blooms speak of my life and its greatest lesson: that the beauty we make never dies.
Another Word for Love is Light
Gretchen E. Henderson
If we could plant a garden of stars, reseed the sky to unearth your root in my pulse and breath in your bloom, our ends might begin to tend heavens within cell, star, seed loss and life. Hold this pace in the dark. Another word for love is light. Find light in the night. Always let there be light.
Searching for Dark Matter
Rebecca Elson
For this we go out dark nights, searching For the dimmest stars, For signs of unseen things: To weigh us down. To stop the universe From rushing on and on Into its own beyond Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold, Its last star going out. Whatever they turn out to be, Let there be swarms of them, Enough for immortality, Always a star where we can warm ourselves. Let there be enough to bring it back From its own edges, To bring us all so close we ignite The bright spark of resurrection.
Acknowledgments
First Congregational Church of Los Angeles: Rev. Laura Fregin, David Harris, Chester McCurry, Reneice Edwards, & Sammi Smith
Live Stream: Saad Martinez
Sound: Marc Doten
Lighting: Robert Talamantes
Graphic Design: Kate Jordan
Proofreader: Laurie Fox
Music Librarian: Hillary Ngo
Grateful thanks to Leah Metzler for organizing the Orchid Quartet and arranging the instrumental parts for “Where the Light Begins.”
Special Thanks to David O for joining us today.
Thank you to all our volunteers this afternoon who are ushering, assisting with Will Call, and making this concert a stellar experience for our aidence, and to all the friends and family members who volunteer their services to support VOX throughout the year.
If you would like to learn more about Tyler Parker, or make a donation to the Tyler Parker Care Fund, please visit https://tinyurl.com/ypesd7uh
This concert is supported, in part, by grants from the California Arts Council, LA County Department of Arts & Culture, Perenchio Foundation, and The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.
VOX also receives generous support from the following organizations:
Confidence Foundation, Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation, The City of Culver City, The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, The City of West Hollywood, and The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.