Earth, Sea & Sky: The Beautiful Poise of Lightness
Saturday, October 10, 7:30 pm
Sunday, October 11, 3:00 pm
Rose City Park United Methodist Church
5830 NE Alameda St, Portland
Adult/Senior – $22 in advance / $30 day-of and at the door
Student – $5 in advance and at the door
Pay what you can – This ticket option is designed to make CAE concerts accessible to those who find our standard ticket pricing might prevent them from attending our concerts.
Choral Arts Ensemble of Portland opens its 58th season with a program that explores our relationship with the natural world and the communities that sustain us. Drawing on the writings of Wendell Berry, John Muir, and other voices who celebrate the beauty and restorative power of nature, Alex Berko’s A Sacred Place bridges the sacred and the secular, the individual and the collective, reminding us of the places that ground and unite us.
Jake Runestad’s Secret of the Sea sets texts by Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Inuit shaman Uvavnuk, taking listeners on a sweeping musical journey across the ocean’s beauty and mystery while contemplating humanity’s place within it.
Continuing our collaboration with Cascadia Composers and the National Association of Composers USA, the program also features four newly commissioned works by contemporary American composers inspired by these themes. Join us for an evening of music celebrating nature, community, compassion, and healing.
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program notes
These lines from the first and last movements of Sacred Place provide the subtitle for this concert. Despite the heaviness and discouragement that may beset us, whether from current events, painful situations affecting family and friends, or our own inner fears and sorrows, we can still find moments when the elements around us feel in balance and full of light. Those moments allow us to experience the sacred in the most ordinary days, but especially when we sense our place in the natural environment of earth, sea, and sky. We need only to let ourselves notice and pay attention, and then, suddenly, we see “a landscape that proclaims a universe”—another line from Sacred Place.