The second half of our season has allowed us to sink deeper into topics that are always on our minds, fully immersed in what I’ll call “Songs about the Earth.” We left John Luther Adams’ Vespers of the Blessed Earth in the rear-view mirror, but his colossal lament for those living miracles of evolution that were and are no more, or are and could soon be no more, lives in us as we move from that elegy to the topic at hand: how we got to this point and how to “Fix It.” 

Julia Wolfe’s unEarth takes the words of young people as its starting and ending points. “Fix It” is their name for the third and final movement, an unusually demanding call to action. To get there, to fix it, we must journey through “where we are,” and so the second movement is called “Forest.” 

“Forest” resonates deeply with The Crossing. The work in which we publicly grappled with the isolation of the pandemic was called The Forest – an extended walk through the woods in Bucks County. The Forest harnessed trees as metaphor for the community of a choir – living things in concord, listening to each other, connecting – a whole, relying entirely on its parts. Julia’s “Forest” begins with the names of trees in many languages: Hindi, Sudanese, Afrikaans, Ukrainian, Chinese…and leads to a reordered Dickinson poem: 

The lightness of Dickinson’s original is now lost, as Julie’s perspective follows the century and a half of bearing away not just the trinkets of the trees, but the trees themselves. It ends with Dickinson’s unanswered question: “What will the fir tree say?,” as the movement crashes forward to that two-word demand from tomorrow’s adults: fix it. 

“Who robbed these woods” might be a line from Ted Hearne’s Farming, which, in The Crossing’s crazy calendar, follows immediately on the heels of unEarth. (It’s quite inspiring to realize the coolness by which we now tumble forward in our work, from the Philadelphia Orchestra to the New York Philharmonic to Haarlem (NE), Stockholm, Helsinki, all in the next four months…) We return to Bucks County, where the woods serve as the backdrop – a kind of scrim to an open-air theater that is the playing space for Ted’s even more specific look at “where we are.” These trees line the banks of the Neshaminy Creek, their neighbors long ago cleared to make the farmland on which we will delicately tread to present Farming. These trees have silently watched the rise of the culture that Farming explores, as it attempts to tackle the extended impact of settler colonialism and its philosophical motivations on agricultural degradation, big tech utopianism, labor alienation, corporate religiosity, and the abstraction of community. Sounds a little dire, but it's an infectious musical package reminding us of how music is used to direct so many aspects of our lives – how we should eat, and what; how we should feel, and what. 

– Donald, May 1, 2023

Major support for Farming has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from an anonymous donor.

Header Photo by Kevin Vondrak from "Walking the Farm" at Kings Oaks Farm, Newtown, PA

Photo 2 by Clara Weishahn at Kings Oaks Farm, Newtown, PA

Photo 3 by John C. Hawthorne from The Forest at Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve, New Hope, PA

unEarth concert photo by Tom Hegen