Hold Fast To Dreams by Joel Thompson presented by the Wisconsin Chamber Choir

Описание: Hold Fast To Dreams by Joel Thompson

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams for when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Excerpt from our program notes by Dr. Robert Gehrenbeck:

“The most famous poem from Hughes’ Montage is called, simply, “Harlem.” In addition to many musical versions, the lines “Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” inspired the award-winning 1959 play by Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun. One of the most recent settings of “Harlem” is by Joel Thompson (b. 1988), a composer, pianist, and conductor based in Atlanta. He is best known for his 2015 work for chorus and orchestra, Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, whose libretto is loosely modeled on Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ. The text for each movement of Thompson’s work consists of the last words of an unarmed Black man before he was killed: Kenneth Chamberlain, Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, Michael Brown, Oscar Grant, John Crawford, and Eric Garner. One year later, in 2016, in response to a commission for a piece about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Thompson paired Hughes’ “Harlem” with “Dreams,” a poem from The Dream Keeper, a 1932 collection by Hughes. The result was a powerful choral anthem, Hold Fast to Dreams, which Thompson dedicated to the memory of three new Black victims of gun violence killed in 2016: MarShawn McCarrell II, a Black Lives Matter activist who committed suicide in Columbus, Ohio; and Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, who were shot by police one day apart in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. The composer elaborates:

These words of Langston Hughes have proven their immortality this year in American history, and not in the way one would hope. The 1951 poem, Harlem, still captures the essence of disillusionment in a deceptively simple series of vivid questions. Dreams, a lesser-known poem, charges the reader to “hold fast to dreams” while making plain the misery of a life without them. One poem summarizes the pain of broken promises and the other encourages faith that things will get better because the alternative is absolute despair. Today’s rampant cynicism casts Hughes’ words in a tired light—these sentiments seem to be the stuff of childhood and naiveté—but my hope is that all who experience this piece will put aside our jaded lenses of fear and choose to be vulnerable and continue to dream.”