This work was commissioned for The Crossing, Donald Nally, conductor; Stare at the Sun, A.J. Keller, conductor; Roots in the Sky, Andrew Major, conductor; Pittsburgh Camerata, Mark Anderson, conductor; The Elora Singers, Mark Vuorinen, conductor; Madison Choral Project, Albert Pinsonneault, conductor; and Volti, Robert Geary, conductor.
for SATB chamber choir (unaccompanied with divisions)
Duration: 25 minutes. Maximum divisi: 4 soprano, 4 alto, 4 tenor, 4 bass
Performances:
Stare at the Sun – Chicago, IL – March 14 and 15, 2026 (world premiere)
Madison Choral Project – Madison, WI – June 20, 2026
Elora Singers – Elora, Ontario – July 19, 2026 (Canadian premiere)
Roots in the Sky – Bozeman, MT – August 21 and 22, 2026
The Crossing – Philadelphia, PA – October 25, 2026
Volti – San Francisco, CA – March 2027
Pittsburgh Camerata – Pittsburgh, PA June 2027
Program Note: (250 words)
The sea came up and drowned. A sentence with a missing object. An ending that has been lost. Or not yet come to pass. A foretelling. The same story, repeated.
The erasure poems in Rachel Jamison Webster’s book, The Sea Came Up & Drowned, were “mined,” each from a single page of John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, a monumental work that chronicles the geologic history of North America from New Jersey to San Francisco. Like the earth it describes, Annals of the Former World tells a story of many layers, offering the reader one of many paths through it – a geology primer, an exploration of plate tectonics, a study of geologic time.
Likewise, Webster’s The Sea Came Up & Drowned offers the reader multiple paths through its poems. The words tumble across the page, asking the reader to fill in the gaps between fragmented deposits. From the histories of westward expansion, patterns emerge in the distillation of McPhee’s words – colonial exploitation, extractive economies, and the costs of human erasure and climate upheaval.
As a meditation on deep time, The Sea Came Up & Drowned points toward other ways of knowing. The final section offers both hope and caution as we approach possible conclusions to the question posed by the title. In our progress and missteps, “Remember, our confusion will reach new heights of sophistication. We lurch forward from error to discovery to error to discovery. The fossil record will tell what happened. If not, it didn’t happen.”
Poetry from The Sea Came Up & Drowned by Rachel Jamison Webster.
Permission granted by Rachel Jamison Webster.
Published by Raw Books Press, 2020.
Poems mined from Annals of the Former World by John McPhee.
Permission granted to Rachel Webster by John McPhee.
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.