Journey Rosa, who was one of four poets to perform at the NHSO's season opener. Chris Randall Photos.
Journey Rosa was dancing across Saturn’s rings, summoning the God of Time as she spoke. Time does not arrive with fanfare / It creeps in quietly, she started. Somewhere far above her, the planet turned quietly in space. Two cores rocking back and forth / Like a pendulum. On the stage below, musicians could already imagine the movement creeping in. Like a breath / Like a clock you swore you had more hours on.
At first, I try not to notice. The low, thick heat of the hall seemed suddenly more palpable. She had parted a curtain in space and time, and was walking through. Musicians, hanging on to each word, waited to take up her call.
That creative interplay—sometimes a tension, more often an opening—filled Yale’s Woolsey Hall last Sunday, as the New Haven Symphony Orchestra kicked off its season with Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” and Gabriella Smith’s “Tumblebird Contrails,” both interwoven with original poetry from New Haven artists. Inspired in part by the urgency of the climate crisis, the works mark the beginning of a season that addresses everything from civil rights to the cosmos to the canon itself.
Artists included Yexandra Diaz, Shawn Douglas, Aaron Jafferis and Journey Rosa, as well as members of the Elm City Girls Choir. It is not the NHSO’s first foray into spoken word: that honor belongs to Joel Thompson’s remarkable breathe/burn: an elegy in 2023, which featured the New Haven poet and activist Sun Queen, and Sharmont “Influence” Little’s take on Ludwig van Beethoven’s The Creatures of Prometheus last year.
“One of the things I wanted to do with ‘The Planets’ was to start a longer journey of thinking about climate and our relationship with the world and nature,” NHSO Music Director Perry So said in a phone call last week. “My hope is that we can build that by putting these questions out there in a way that doesn't make people feel alienated.”
Chris Randall Photos.
So has wanted to do “The Planets” since his return to New Haven, he added: the piece was a favorite of his as a kid growing up in Hong Kong, where the planetarium and the symphony would join forces to perform it every few years. When he thought about how to present it, folding in poetry made sense. Jafferis, with whom So worked on the 2011 musical Stuck Elevator, was the one to suggest adding four voices.
“It's a great piece with the orchestra, and because of its astrological connections, there was a lot of room for poetry to make an intervention,” So said.
That approach was fully on display as Jafferis took the mic on Woolsey’s second story, the audience falling to a hush around him. So, who was the musical director on Stuck Elevator over a decade ago, had already set the stage, explaining that of the seven planets in Holst’s orchestral suite, Earth does not appear. Smith’s 12-minute composition, in that absence, seemed like a logical place to begin. In addition to her musical work, Smith is very much an environmentalist, and weaves that interest into almost everything she does.
Day break / The ocean open / Blowing the greatest wind instrument ever made, Jafferis’ steady voice boomed. One floor below, kids ran back and forth on the sides of the hall. Sunlight, hot and bright, streamed in through a door propped open by the stage. Even with the orchestra still quiet, an image began to form, of the vast, wide sea and faint horizon line in the distance.
The million wings of dawn / Blowing the white caps / Dark matter groaning in the mouths of whales —
In the audience, it was possible to close one’s eyes, and see it all: the ocean as it once was, clean and majestic, the gulls swooping with their loud, shrill and singsong voices overhead, the sheer vastness of the water below, even its darkest depths teeming with life. In Woolsey, where even the slightest movement can cause a chair to creak, it seemed that the audience was breathing right along in time with the water, a certain cadence to its waves.
Chris Randall Photos.
But just as a person had settled into that vision, Jafferis shifted the scene to his five-year-old child, who recently broke their wrist in a fall. His voice rising, Jafferis imagined the inside of their body, the whoosh of blood and stretch of bone that spurs regeneration. A cacophony of platelets clotting / And neutrophils calling, he read, knitting the enormity of the sea and the small wonder of a tiny arm. In their seats, listeners could see the miraculous way a body fixes itself, a ballet that owes itself to both man and nature.
On the stage, members of the orchestra were ready to take over. In Smith’s piece, inspired by a backpacking trip in Point Reyes, a soft, sometimes frenetic interplay of percussion and strings conjures the ocean, as instruments transform into chattering birds. The sound of the surf makes its way to shore, until a listener can close their eyes and see the Pacific. Drums crash beneath them, and the brass, strings, and woodwinds sound not so much like an orchestra, but like an ocean, in all its cacophonous glory. A rising tide of brass wraps the whole room in its sound, and then lets horns swoop in one atop the other.
Life, below and above the surface, refuses to be quiet: strings shriek and tremble until they are their most animal selves. Something moans in the distance, and a bassoon becomes the reeded blowhole of a whale. Horns and strings, timpani and tuba, bring a person right up to the edge of the ocean. Just when it seems they all might recede, the piece becomes a wall of sound, so massive and overwhelming that the listener’s only choice is to give in to it, to bow to the surf and the sea.
There’s something both intensely mortal and extraterrestrial about this, a reminder of the duty a person has to witness the universe around them, and do as much as they can not to harm it in the short time that they are here. The ocean, after all, was here long before us, and it will outlive us all, but its health is directly impacted by human intervention. It’s a powerful call to action, from a composer whose work has also often centered the urgency of climate change and environmental stewardship.
Chris Randall Photos.
Sunday, it also became an opening for the interplay of music and poetry, an offering that brought in an audience that was as intergenerational as it was diverse. As Diaz took the mic for “Sower of Parables,” written in homage to the planet “Mars, Bringer of War,” she took it back to the beginning of time itself, and so too the beginning of conflict that has ravaged the earth and its people.
In the beginning / There was the word / And the word was with God / Because God is a poet, she read. The words hung in the air, breath rising and falling in between them.
In a section just to the left of the stage, a mom held open a well-loved copy of Jessica Courtney Tickle’s The Story Orchestra: The Planets, following along with her two young boys snuggled up on either side of the book. Closer to Woolsey’s heavy doors, kids sat on laps and bounced in snug carriers. For a moment, it seemed possible to imagine a world without war, kinder for the small hands that will one day inherit it.
In the beginning there was darkness / And God said let there be light /So I arrived, crowned in iron / Rust upon my skin / a red glare in the sky, Diaz read. On the stage beneath her, trumpets had not yet begun their imposing procession forward, and yet a person could feel the air shift around them. The muscular horns and clipped, succinct percussion were all to come. Diaz spun story out of hot, thick air, with turns of phrase that felt as red and fiery as the planet.
I am the original spark / I am the parable and the sower / The farmer and the soldier / I carved swords from plows, she pressed on. I am the warrior in the garden / Harvesting /Because what better fertilizer than blood —
Attendees had yet to hear the growl of horns that signals the planet’s entrance, or the climactic sweep of strings, the cymbals so brash that a person can feel them in their chest. And yet, the audience was all in. Diaz, in her own way, had laid the groundwork for the movement. When she stepped back from the mic, musicians were ready, with a dramatic march that played in the orchestral suite.
Shawn Douglas and Aaron Jafferis. Chris Randall Photos.
Some of the afternoon’s most exciting moments came from this back-and-forth, poets reframing a work of classical music that has existed for over 100 years, and has inspired everything from Star Wars to King Crimson to Led Zeppelin riffs to The Legend of Zelda. In Douglas’ “Without Me,” for instance, the poet put his own spin on “Venus, The Bringer of Peace,” the second planet to appear in the suite.
Line by line, he wove between what it means to be human (“Peace like when your children go to sleep”) to a reverence for nature (“Peace like when you look up in the sky and feel the breeze”) to a world he, speaking as Venus, held gently in his hands and tried to shape (“Remember when the times were getting dark I kept the peace”). In Woolsey, where applause had followed the first movement, listeners let the words wash over them, finding a rhythm to the show.
So too in “Jollity,” named for Holst’s “Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity.” Taking the mic, arms rising and falling with the words, Jafferis conjured “a million babies marching” to Holst’s bouncing, “bombastic brass,” with an image so vivid and nonsensical that laughter rippled through the audience. Beneath him, musicians prepared to chart that same trajectory, where timpani, brass, strings and bells do a sort of jubilant two-step with each other until the piece buttons back up, and Holst gets serious.
In his research for the show, Jafferis learned that in 1921, that more serious, “totally dignified” section of the work became the music for the patriotic hymn "I Vow to Thee, My Country." It made him ask aloud: what does it mean for an army of jolly babies to suddenly pledge themselves to a single country, and not to each other? What does it mean, really, for any of us to fight for something if it just breeds more fighting?
Maybe those questions are the point. When The Planets premiered in 1918—after a conflict that brought the Western World to its knees—Holst transported his listeners to the farthest reaches of the solar system, imagining a place that was so much bigger than they were. Around him, Britain had been ravaged by World War I, and the work let his listeners travel elsewhere for a little while.
Chris Randall Photos.
Just shy of 100 years later, Smith sat down to compose, and tried to remind her fellow Earthlings of the wonder that was all around them, and their responsibility to care for it. That, So suggested in both words and in the programming itself, seemed like a place to start.
“As artistic director of the symphony, I can make choices on how to start these conversations,” he said of the choice to bring the forms together. The universe is a thread through the season, he added, including a program with music from John Williams, Hans Zimmer, and Gene Roddenberry in April.
It’s a conversation well worth having, just as it was when Smith wrote her piece in 2014 and even when Holst began “The Planets” a century prior. Since June, when the symphony played on the New Haven Green during the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, heatwaves engulfed Europe, killing thousands of people. Wildfires spread across France, Greece and Turkey. Severe flooding in Pakistan has killed hundreds and displaced thousands; flash floods in Texas took the lives of almost 150 people, including 36 little girls at summer camp.
By 2050, the journal Nature recently reported, pollution from wildfire smoke will kill about 70,000 Americans a year. Air pollution from burning fossil fuels has already made us sicker than we were a decade ago, with those subject to environmental racism paying the heaviest toll. When faced earlier this year with the opportunity to act on plastic pollution, which is in our oceans, our clothes, our bodies, and even our developing babies, the world largely chose corporate interests over human lives.
No one, including artists, is immune, and there is no such thing any more as a climate haven (if you were in doubt, consider that Woolsey Hall was never meant to feel like a sauna in late September, with temperatures that are as punishing as its acoustics). It’s hard to imagine, maybe, that taking the podium doesn’t feel a little bit like being the rückenfigur on the edge of a cliff, staring out into the abyss.
And yet, if the opener is any indication, So’s response is to dig in, and meet the moment in the ways that he can. In Rosa’s “The Weight of Time,” for instance, Saturn was no longer just a ringed, haloed marvel, but a reminder of time itself, with a diction and punch that made it impossible to look away. Neither Rosa nor So approached this with fear, but with a matter-of-factness, like Okay, this thing is happening, how are we going to adapt?
When she announced of Saturn that “its march is steady, its heartbeats dissonant, a reminder that childhood is already slipping through my fingers,” that weight felt instantly relatable. When she acknowledged that “we are not crushed by time, we are hardened by it,” what stuck was the succinct heft of the distinction. When she suggested that “growing up is not an ending / it is a passage,” the words hit exactly where they were supposed to.
“Music is not only for entertainment,” Smith said in a 2023 interview about arts and climate with the New York Times, and listeners could hear it in real time. “Music is a tool, a very powerful tool, for change, and for societal transformation, and for communal action. Which I think, especially now, it’s important to be using every tool we have at our disposal, and music is one of those … and music helps us feel the things we need to feel in order to do the work we need to do.”