S.A.T.B. with divisi

Text by Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson

Duration: 3 minutes

Program note:

A Tahoe Pastorale was written primarily in a hotel room in South Lake Tahoe, California. After premiering my Missa Brevis Sacramentum just a few months earlier, I had planned to step away from choral writing to focus on orchestral score study and a multi-percussion project. Yet the quiet allure of winter in Tahoe and a growing fascination with Cecil Effinger’s Four Pastorales for oboe and chorus ultimately drew me back to the choral medium.

The text of A Tahoe Pastorale interweaves two poems by Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson, poets born in the same year (1830) and the same town (Amherst, Massachusetts). Despite these parallel beginnings, their lives diverged profoundly: Dickinson lived in seclusion and saw almost none of her poetry published during her lifetime, while Jackson became a prominent writer and a leading advocate for Native American rights.

I initially considered titling the work “An Amherst Pastorale" in honor of the poets’ shared origins. However, never having visited Amherst, the piece ultimately grew into a reflection of the place where it was conceived, Lake Tahoe. The stillness of its snow-covered pines, the chill of its winter air, and frigid lake itself.