I Speak of Blood — Eric Tuan

 

A third-generation Californian of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino descent, composer Eric Tuan is an alumnus and current Artistic Director of the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir, and a Stanford University and University of Cambridge graduate. Tuan is frequently commissioned by leading choral organizations, including Volti, Peninsula Women’s Chorus, Cantabile Youth Singers of Silicon Valley, Schola Cantorum, Musae, and Vox Aurea, and his music has been performed at state, regional, and national conventions of the American Choral Directors Association and Chorus America. Often addressing contemporary social topics, his choral works can be purchased through E.C. Schirmer and through his website www.erictuanmusic.com

 

I encountered the poetry of Xu Lizhi (许立志) for the first time in 2014. A gifted writer from rural Guangdong province, Xu migrated to Shenzhen in 2010 to work for the electronics manufacturer Foxconn. Foxconn's Shenzhen factory, which at its peak employed nearly half a million people, produces the majority of the world's iPhones. Disheartened by the dehumanizing environment and brutal working conditions, Xu published powerful poetry about his experiences online, in magazines and journals, and in a local newspaper.

 

Xu Lizhi jumped from the window of his Foxconn dormitory on September 30, 2014. He was one of at least twenty-two Foxconn workers to die by suicide since 2010.

 

The poet, literary critic, and filmmaker Qin Xiaoyu and translator Eleanor Goodman included several of Xu's poems in their seminal collection Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry (White Pine Press, 2016). I'm deeply grateful to Dennis Maloney and Eleanor Goodman for granting me permission to set two of Xu's poems as part of this new work for 21V, directed by Martín Benvenuto.

 

Xu Lizhi was born three days before me in July 1990. It is hard to believe that he has already been gone for over a decade. I hope that these two choral settings amplify his voice, and uplift the experiences of those who continue to labor in degrading conditions to bring us our phones, tablets, and computers.

 

There is a staggering human cost to the technological fever dreams of Silicon Valley. What is the price we pay for the technology in our pockets?

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 – Eric Tuan

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A Screw Plunges to the Ground

 

A screw plunges to the ground 

working overtime at night

it drops straight down, with a faint sound

that draws no one's attention

just like before

on the same kind of night

a person plunged to the ground

 

I Speak of Blood

 

I speak of blood, since it can't be avoided

I also want to speak of breezes, flowers, snow, the moon

speak of the past dynasty, poetry in wine 

but reality makes me speak only of blood 

blood comes from matchbox rented rooms

narrow, cramped, sunless year round

oppressing the working men and women

distant husbands and wives gone astray

guys from Sichuan hawking spicy soup

old people from Henan selling trinkets on blankets

and me, toiling all day just to live

and opening my eyes at night to write poems

I speak to you of these people, I speak of us

ants struggling one by one through the swamp of life

blood walking drop by drop along the worker's road

blood driven off by the city guards or the choke of a machine

scattering insomnia, illness, unemployment, suicide along the way 

the words explode one by one

in the Pearl Delta, in the belly of China

dissected by the seppuku blade of order forms

I speak of this to you

though my voice goes hoarse and my tongue cracks 

in order to rip open the silence of this era

I speak of blood, and the sky smashes open

I speak of blood, and my whole mouth turns red

 

– Xu Lizhi, translated by Eleanor Goodman

 

Bright Morning Stars Are Rising — Traditional Appalachian, arr. Shawn Kirchner

 

“Bright Morning Stars” is one of my favorite American folksongs. In addition to its beautiful words and gracefully arching phrases, I appreciate the song’s irregularity of meter on the final phrase of each verse. There’s something “alive” about song material that unfolds beyond the careful borders of symmetry.

 

I learned “Bright Morning Stars” from my college roommate during a road trip as we shared songs in turn—the old-fashioned way of passing time. I had never heard it before, and I made everyone in the car sing it again and again in harmony. I especially liked the way the song linked the “external” imagery of dawn and morning stars to the corresponding “internal” movements of renewal that we all experience—“day a-breaking in my soul.” Years later, in the tender time following my mother’s untimely death, I wrote the original SATB setting for chorus, soloist, and piano. The SSAA version was commissioned by WomenSing in 2012. 

 

I made one addition to the original lyrics which ask, in turn, “O where are our dear fathers? O where are our dear mothers?” (The response: “They are down in the valley praying. They have gone to heaven shouting.”) I added a final verse, in which the long-departed father and mothers have a chance to ask: “O where are our dear children?” The response: “They’re upon the earth a-dancing.” I like the image of those who have passed on and those who are yet present upon the earth calling to each other “across eternity.”

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– Shawn Kirchner

 

Como pequeñas gotas de rocío — arr. Víctor Daniel Lozada 

 

Venezuelan instrumentalist, tenor, choral conductor, and composer Víctor Daniel Lozada has received choral composition awards in America, Europe, and Asia. A highlight of his awards is winning 1st place in the mixed choir category in the V International Choral Composition Competition of the International Federation of Choral Music.​