Lamenting Earth
for Tenor, String Quartet, and Piano
(Full Score)
Texts provided by Claire Wahmanholm and Kaufman Music Center Special Music School Students:
Mirabelle Alpher, Sibel Ayyildiz, Cobie Buckmire, Alexi Fusina, Montgomery Harkness, Rinoha Isetani, Casey Schopflocher, Sophia Shao, and Aim Zubex
student texts adapted by Clare Wahmanholm and Vivian Fung
5/2025
Commissioned by Kaufman Music Center (November Blooming, Sorrow Skies, Nature’s Melody of Death) and Dominique and Raoul Slavin (O)
duration: ca. 20 minutes
November Blooming
By Sophia Shao
The cherry trees bloom in November, their puffs soft against a steely sky. The flower crowns I fashion on every walk feel ominous, promising a brittle, brown spring. Each bud coaxed forth by the tender caress of an artificial warmth, faux Mother Earth soon trembles on her naked branch, left to the mercy of whipping wind and fickle weather. Falling out of winter’s fingers and into wastelands of untimely births, a pale, forsaken petal sinks.
Lament
By Montgomery Harkness, Rinoha Isetani, Casey Schopflocher, Mirabelle Alpher
In our bloody hands burns a fatal flame. Bright metals are scattered around; they carve a scar on the earth. Tormented cries lament wasted time. Our screams are hopeless. I fall into the abyss— through runoff, toxic water, historyʹ s cries.
I want to caress the Earth, but will I die in its embrace? Love is not meaningless as ruin looms: death, extinction.
My body is more sorrow than water; it flows like snowmelt, like glaciers becoming rivers. It flows, each year faster than the last. As we fall from grace, I raise my eyes to the sky to see the burnt sunset of another fiery day. The once green hillsides slowly drain to white. Ocean levels rise night by night. Imagine what galaxies would see; imagine our lives from above.
By Claire Wahmanholm
Once there was an opening, an operation: out of which oared the ocean, then oyster and oystercatcher, opal and opal‐crowned tanager. From ornateness came the ornate flycatcher and ornate fruit dove. From oil, the oilbird. O is for opus, the Orphean warblerʹ s octaves, the oratorio of orioles. O for the osprey’s ostentation, the owl and its collection of ossicles. In Octoberʹ s ochre, the orchard is overgrown with orange and olive, oleander and oxlip. Ovals of dew on the oat grass. O for obsidian, onyx, ore, for boreholes like inverted obelisks. O for the onionʹ s concentric Os, observable only when cut, for the opium oozing from the poppyʹ s globe only when scored. O for our organs, for the os of the cervix, the double Os of the ovaries plotted on the bodyʹ s plane to mark the origin. O is the orbit that cradles the eye. The oculus opens an O to the sky, where the starry outlines of men float like bubbles between us and oblivion. Once there were oarfish, opaleyes, olive flounders. Once the oxbows were not overrun with nitrogen. O for the mussels opening in the oceanʹ s oven. O for the rising ozone, the dropping oxygen, for algae overblooming like an omen or an oracle. O Earth, outgunned and outmanned. O who has made orphans of our hands.
Vast, Green
By Sibel Ayyildiz, Aim Zubex, Alexi Fusina, Cobie Buckmire
In the end, love unites all. Despite death and destruction, we love earth’s magnificence. Everyone feels it: beside the rivers, nature’s quiet scenes are vast and green. The grasses bloom with flowers. We walk into the ocean, feeling the dry wind and cool water.
Everyone feels it— with our cold veins of stone tearing apart all that’s in our path, seeing the flames scattered across the tall trees, the birds swirling recklessly throughout the hurting skies.
Death knocks on our doors. We try to embrace what we have left, but now the world we’ve broken is too hard to fix.
Sorrow hits us. We shield our faces, trying to remember the last time we saw green.
MontgomeryHarkness,RinoshaIsetani, CaseySchopflocher,MirabelleAlpher
II.Lament
Once p (e) therewasan open - -ing anoper --ation - outofwhichroaredtheo - - cean
ova --ries plotted - onthebody’s - plane to mark the
Once pppquasi-whisper,lovingly therewereoar fish