In Santa Fe this weekend, the Sangre de Cristo Chorale will present a show themed around the poetry of Walt Whitman. The program, “America’s Bard,” features compositions inspired by Whitman’s poetry. Sangre de Cristo Chorale Music Director George Case said the nation’s semiquincentennial inspired him to develop a show based on a classic American theme.
“I got interested in American music and in American poets, and how those two things have overlapped in various times and I've always loved Whitman's poetry and he was an incredibly prolific poet who composers since his lifetime have responded to in really interesting ways,” Case said.
Case said he could have programmed five different concerts just with the music that has been written to Whitman’s poetry.
“But I decided to focus really on the American responses to his poetry, and specifically those in the 20th and 21st century,” he said.
The concerts will feature Jeffrey Van’s composition “A Procession Winding Around Me” for guitar and chorus. The title comes from one of Whitman’s renowned Civil War poems.
“It's four movements, it's dramatic, it's beautiful, it's meaningful, and we're featuring Albuquerque guitarist Martin Lee, who'll join us for this specific piece,” Case said.
Other works include music by 20th century American composers, including Norman Dello Joio, William Schuman, and Eric Whitacre.
Whitman’s themes include a consistent message of sustaining hope through adversity, which Case said resonates as powerfully in our own time as it did in Whitman’s day.
“I think his texts and poetry have lasted for so long because they are imbued with a quintessentially American optimism,” Case said, “He wrote during a time in our country when there were the two disparate poles of great innovation with the industrial revolution, etc., and great tragedy with the Civil War, and immigration issues and all these these really challenging topics and through all of that he remains ultimately optimistic about the American democratic experiment”
The shows are scheduled for 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at the First Presbyterian Church in Santa Fe.
