After year delay, Tucson's True Concord to perform world premiere

Composer Jocelyn Hagen has been waiting a year to meet soprano Susanna Phillips.

This weekend, the pair will finally share the spotlight when True Concord Voices & Orchestra hosts Phillips for the world premiere of Hagen’s choral symphony “Here I Am.”

“I am so excited,” Hagen said on the phone last week with a giddiness to her voice that couldn’t hide her fan-girling. “I wrote her a heck of a part. It is extremely virtuosic and I knew that I could do that for her.”

The pair will perform the work three times this weekend as part of the 2023 Tucson Desert Song Festival. It is one of four world premieres planned for the festival, which continues through Feb. 19.

True Concord Music Director and Founder Eric Holtan tapped Hagen in 2019 to write a piece commemorating the 100th anniversary of the suffrage movement that gave women the right to vote. The commission through True Concord’s Dorothy Dyer Vanek Fund for Excellence followed the ensemble’s performance of Hagen’s choral symphony “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci,” which included multimedia digitally-synced to the music.

True Concord was the only professional ensemble in a consortium of arts organizations that commissioned Hagen’s “Notebooks” project, so Hagen felt a kinship to Holtan.

As she was researching what text she would use to tell the story, Hagen said she “kept going beyond the American story of suffrage and instead focused on the voices of women from around the world and how we are still fighting for our rights around the world.”

“I was thinking about the women in Iran who are fighting for a dress code and how the women of Afghanistan can’t go to university any more,” she said. “It’s still a conversation that we need to be having in the world today.”

Hagen incorporated the voices of 46 women, from English writer Virginia Woolf and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo to Pakastani activist Malala Yousafzai and jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald.

She also commissioned eight artists — French painter Cecile Yadro, Ukranian painter Jessika Lavren, British artists Rosso Emerald Crimson and Liz Y. Ahmet, German artist Lisa Kröger and Americans Dimitra Milan, Lauren Ashley and Justin Schell — to make portraits of the women for a multimedia element. The portraits are on display at Hotel Congress through the month of February.

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Hagen spent months researching the writings and histories of the 46 women, selecting the text, typing it into her computer then printing it out and laying the pages on the floor so she could visualize how it all fit together.

“That process takes a long time, months and months, almost as long as the writing of the music,” said Hagen, who with her husband, composer and True Concord vocalist Timothy C. Takach, was tapped this season to be True Concord’s inaugural composers-in-residence. “But I really cared about getting it right and getting the message right.”

The four-movement “Here I Am” opens with a libretto that includes snippets from poems and quotes by famous 20th and 21st century feminist activists and excerpts from British suffrage leader Emmeline Pankurst’s “Freedom or Death” speech in 1913 that inspired American women to follow her lead and seek the right to vote.

The second movement goes to a dark place with palpable anger and a dance that sounds like a waltz (one, two, three) before it adds a beat (one, two, three, four) or drops one (one, two), taking you off your rhythm.

For Hagen, it represents the dance that women often play when it comes to issues in their lives, like talking about sexism, equal rights or pay discrepancy over their male counterparts.

“We have learned how to keep our mouths shut,” Hagen said. “That kind of represents that uneven ground. In the end, anger wins out in the second movement and I think that’s important. I had to explore that to also explore the other ideas, which is empowerment and the strength and inspiration and hope. I had to go to the dark place, too.”

The piece ends with silence from the choir and orchestra as the Tucson Girls Chorus, several women from True Concord and soloist Phillips project the future in “Tell Your Story,” anchored by Amanda Lovelace’s poem that encourages women to write their own story.

True Concord’s Holtan said one of the most poignant lines of the finale comes from Hmong-American writer Kao Kalia Yang (“The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir”): “We will be the ones marching down the ragged roads of history, paving it for generations to come.”

“It’s not just to vote; it’s to be heard and honored, to see equality in all things from position to pay,” he said. “It’s relevant yesterday, today and tomorrow.”