Tucson choir focuses on immigrant experience in 2nd 'American Dream' concert

True Concord Voices and Orchestra may be onto something with its “The American Dream” season.

Music Director Eric Holtan said the ensemble has seen its highest season subscriptions in its 22 years and its biggest opening concert with “Voices of Immigrants” on Oct. 17-19.

“This programming this year in which we’re celebrating the wonderful diversity of our American culture has really resonated with audiences, and so we’re excited about that,” Holtan said last week.

The first concert focused on folk song traditions from the immigrant groups making up the fabric of America’s multiculturalism.

The second concert this weekend deep dives into the immigrant experience, from the promises printed on the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”) to the broken promises of the American dream where not everyone is invited.

”Give Me Your Tired” opens with the world premiere of Hans Bridger Heruth‘s “Pioneers Hymn,” which True Concord commissioned from Heruth after he was named the winner of the ensemble’s eighth Stephen Paulus Emerging Composers Competition.

“We had well over 100 applicants from all over the country,” Holtan said of the competition, named in honor of the late composer Paulus.

Paulus, who died in 2014, had a long relationship with the choir, including composing its landmark “Prayers and Remembrances” 9/11 commemoration that earned True Concord its first Grammy nomination. Paulus earned a posthumous Grammy in 2016 for that work.

True Concord had Heruth set an excerpt from Langston Hughes’ poem “Let America Be America,” in which the renowned Harlem Renaissance leader laments that racism in America meant that the dream of freedom and equality was never for African Americans: “There’s never been equality for me, nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free’.”

Hughes “acknowledges all of the incredible benefits of living in a country like the United States, but also acknowledging that not everyone has had equal access to those benefits,” Holtan said. “Langston laments that disparity, but has a hopeful tone, an optimistic tone, that in this pursuit of forming a more perfect union that we would be able, over the course of time, to make all of the benefits of being an American applicable and accessible to everybody of all times and all backgrounds.”

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Caroline Shaw’s “To the Hands” uses the words of poet Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus,” which she wrote in 1883 to raise money to build the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. The poem was cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted onto the pedestal in 1903.

Holtan said Shaw uses Lazarus’ words “to really encourage the listener to think about what we can do to be of assistance to those who are of refugee status and how we can be more welcoming, more consoling, more caring.”

“It really is a call to action by the listener through Caroline’s very unique style of writing that earned her that Pulitzer Prize a decade ago,” Holtan said of the composer, who was the youngest to receive a Pulitzer for music when she earned the honor in 2013 at age 30.

“To the Hands” uses some of the techniques Shaw used in her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Partita for 8 Voices,” including vocalizations that “just explore the different kinds of sounds that human beings can make with their lips, teeth and gums and vocal folds.”

“So there’s a number of special effects all creating this aura, if you will, that brings the listener in and really gets the listener to hone in on the message of the text,” Holtan said.

The concert ends with Morten Lauridsen’s 1997 quasi-requiem “Lux Aeterna,” inspired by the death of his mother.

Holtan called the work the composer’s magnum opus.

“It draws some texts from the traditional requiem mass, but other texts as well, sacred texts, all that draw upon the theme of light,” Holtan said. “It’s a truly uplifting piece that paints a musical picture of the afterlife and eternal rest, and that we who are left behind can be inspired by the light of those who went before.”

“I love that on this all-American program, we’ve got a young up-and-comer in Hans. We’ve got a rising star in Caroline Shaw. And then we have what I would call one of the deans of American choral music in Morton Lauridsen,” he added.

True Concord will perform the concert three times this weekend: at 4 p.m. Friday, Nov. 21, at Green Valley’s Valley Presbyterian Church, 2800 S. Camino del Sol; at 4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 22, at Catalina United Methodist Church, 2700 E. Speedway; and at 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 23, at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 7575 N. Paseo del Norte.

Tickets are $23.50-$63.50 through trueconcord.org.