Today’s performance is sponsored in part by:
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GREAT BEND CHORALE
MATTHEW MELENDEZ, DIRECTOR
TESS ALTIVEROS, SOPRANO
—
Barber (1910-1981) “Agnus Dei” – 1967
Stolyarov (b. 1990) “Out of the Depths” – 2016
Muehleisen (b. 1955) “Borders” – 2019
1. Welcome Song
Soprano solo, SATB choir, Children’s choir, Instrumental ensemble
2. Mothers of Exiles
a) An Irish Mother’s Prayer (1850)
Soprano solo, Instrumental ensemble
b) The Mother of Exiles (1883)
SATB choir, Instrumental ensemble
3. Strangers in a Strange Land
a) Refugees
SATB choir, Instrumental ensemble
b) The Mother of Exiles – Reprise (Chorale)
SATB choir, Children’s choir, Instrumental ensemble
c) Welcome Song – Reprise
SATB choir, Children’s choir, Instrumental ensemble
4. Interlude: No Irish Need Apply (1863)
SATB choir, Soprano solo, Instrumental ensemble
5. Sweet Land of Liberty
a) Anthem
SATB choir, Readers (incl. Soprano solo), Instrumental ensemble
b) Lullaby: Arrorró mi Niño
Soprano solo, Instrumental ensemble
c) Border Lines
Children’s choir, Readers, SATB choir, Instrumental ensemble
6. Song of the Stranger
TUTTI: SATB choir, Children’s choir, Soprano solo, Instrumental ensemble
What do we owe one another?
It is one of the oldest questions humanity asks itself — a question at once political, spiritual, and deeply personal. How do we respond to grief? To suffering? To displacement? To the stranger standing at the edge of our community, our nation, or our own guarded hearts?
The works on tonight’s program approach these questions not through argument, but through sound. Each composition inhabits a different emotional landscape — lament, prayer, remembrance, welcome — yet together they trace a journey from sorrow toward compassion, from isolation toward community.
Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei opens the program with one of the most haunting musical meditations of the twentieth century. Barber (1910–1981), one of America’s most celebrated composers, originally wrote the music in 1936 as the now-iconic Adagio for Strings, later arranging it in 1967 for chorus using the ancient Latin text of the Mass: “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us… grant us peace.”
Barber’s music has become inseparable from moments of national mourning and collective grief, but beneath its sorrow lies something more searching than despair. The music continually reaches upward, straining toward resolution, toward mercy, toward peace. In its choral form, the humanity of the piece becomes even more immediate, as breath itself becomes prayer.
Where Barber’s work offers communal lament, Andrey Stolyarov’s Out of the Depths speaks from the raw interior world of personal loss. Russian-born American composer Andrey Stolyarov has become widely recognized for music that combines luminous harmonies with emotional directness and spiritual depth. Written after the devastating loss of a family member in 2016, Out of the Depths serves as a musical elegy — a place, in the composer’s words, “where words fail.”
Built around a persistent C drone that gradually transforms from the darkness of C minor into the radiance of C major, the work unfolds like a long exhalation of grief. Fragments of melody pass between voices as though memory itself were being shared communally among the choir. Above the ensemble, a unison treble line emerges like distant light breaking through cloud. The organ grounds the work beneath shifting textures, at times supporting, at times conversing with the chorus in quiet polyphonic reflection. The result is music that does not attempt to explain suffering so much as accompany us through it.
John Muehleisen’s Borders expands these intimate questions into a broader meditation on identity, belonging, and human dignity. Commissioned by Matthew Melendez and the Great Bend Center for Music, Borders received its world premiere at Carnegie Hall in 2019 and was later completed in its full form with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Seattle composer John Muehleisen is widely admired for choral music of profound emotional and literary sophistication. His works often explore questions of history, justice, faith, and memory, weaving together contemporary texts with deeply human storytelling. In Borders, he creates what might initially appear to be an “immigration cantata,” but the work ultimately reaches toward something far more universal.
Beginning with a Salish song of welcome from the Pacific Northwest, Borders interlaces texts from immigrants and refugees across generations alongside poetry by Emma Lazarus, Brian Bilston, and Alberto Ríos. Musical influences from European, African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Latin American traditions are woven into a single musical tapestry. The work asks not simply how nations define borders, but how human beings construct barriers between one another — political, cultural, emotional, and spiritual. At its core lies a radical proposition: that music itself may be one of the ways we cross them.
Taken together, tonight’s works invite us into a shared act of listening — not only to beautiful music, but to one another. They remind us that grief is universal, that mercy is necessary, and that every society is ultimately judged by how it responds to vulnerability and difference.
The title of tonight’s concert comes from the words of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew: “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.” In a world increasingly shaped by division and fear, these works ask us to imagine another possibility: that compassion may yet be stronger than exclusion, and that perhaps the deepest human calling is not merely to protect our borders, but to recognize ourselves in one another.
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From the Composer
Borders was commissioned by Matthew Melendez and the Great Bend Center for Music in collaboration with the Distinguished Concerts International New York Premiere Project and with support from the Mason County Washington Historic Preservation Commission and Sierra Pacific Industries. Due to time constraints at its original 2019 Carnegie Hall premiere, the performance was not able to feature three of the movements originally planned for the full version of the work. But thanks to generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the work is finally being performed in its full form. Borders is scored for soprano solo, adult SATB choir, children’s chorus, strings, piano, timpani, and percussion.
On one level, Borders might be called an “immigration cantata”; however, it’s about much more than immigration. Beginning with a Pacific Northwest Salish song of welcome, Borders weaves together traditional European, African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latinx music and lyrics with the poetry of Emma Lazarus, Brian Bilston, and Alberto Ríos, a letter from an Irish mother during the potato famine, and quotes from immigrants both past and present to deliver a riveting and emotional musical odyssey that explores not only the history of immigration in America and the enduring significance of America’s identity as the ultimate melting pot; it also proposes a vision of life together that transcends the physical borders between nations and states, as well as the more symbolic political, social, and cultural borders, and even borders between each of us as individuals. On another level the work explores the question: “How should we treat the stranger in our midst?”—whether or not they are immigrants or just someone who is different from us.
Ultimately, Borders endeavors to transcend the increasingly divisive political discussions about immigration and to put a human face on the root reasons for immigration. Borders is not a political work and is neither pro- nor anti-immigration—in fact, both sides are represented in the work. Rather, it endeavors to challenge us all to place the complex and emotionally charged topic of immigration policy within the context of compassion and empathy for our fellow human beings. The text for movement 2a.“An Irish Mother’s Prayer” is a letter from a desperate Irish mother written to her older son during the Irish potato famine of the mid-19th century in which she describes her suffering and that of her younger son. In it she begs her older son (already in America) to fulfill his promise to bring them to America. In that spirit, Borders encourages us to look beyond the complex political issues around immigration in order to put a human face on the discussion and to consider the reasons why people would want to emigrate from their current homes to another country, especially to America, with its promise of hope, liberty, freedom, and the ability to make a better life for themselves and for their families. In other words, to fulfill their “yearning to breathe free,” as Emma Lazarus states in her poem, The New Colossus, the words of which are enshrined on the Statue of Liberty and which form the text for movement 2b. “The Mother of Exiles” in Borders.
The human face of immigration is also described so eloquently in Alberto Rios’ poem, Border Lines:
We seem to live in a world of maps:
But in truth we live in a world made
Not of paper and ink but of people.Which way we look at the drawing
Makes all the difference.
Those lines are our lives.
Together,
Let us turn the map until we see clearly:
The border is what joins us,
Not what separates us.
John Muehleisen, Nov 2023.
Noted for her "enthralling" (Seattle Times) and “particularly soulful” interpretations (L.A. Times), soprano 
