Creation

Wind Symphony Version: TBD

Orchestra version: 1.1.1.1 / 2.2.1.1 /timp.3perc / hp / str (5-4-3-2-1) 

Chamber version: 1.0.0.0 / 0.1.0.0 / timp.2perc / pn / violin solo, cello solo, double bass solo

“If the beginnings”

In the beginning was an upending
of a beginning undone to begin.

In the beginning was a transcending
of darkness with light, ascending again.

In the beginning was an attending
to fish, fowl, and fruit seeded to place

what had begun to be appalling
retold as falling, behind and from grace.

And it was so.
And so it was.
And was it so?

At the beginning renounced an ending,
the name for “beginning” contended with

when the beginning fell to portending,
a condescending that would not give in

to the beginning that found renaming
beginnings as more: intending to mend

what began as a story of rending
middle from ending, started to bend.

And it was so.
And was it so?
And so it was.

If we could fathom a garden of tending
more than defending sore borders of words

then our anthems could sing beyond tensions 
compressed as expulsion, pulsing a dirge.

If this beginning grew more beginnings,
where grace allowed questions as much as faith,

what’s still falling might open to loving
as more beginnings begin to amaze.

Let it be so.
So let it be:
receding apple,
reseed tree.

— Gretchen E. Henderson (retold from the perspective of Eve) 

“Silent Symphony”

Two hundred million years ago, long before we walked the Earth, it was a world of cold-blooded creatures and dull color — a kind of terrestrial sea of brown and green. There were plants, but their reproduction was a tenuous game of chance — they released their pollen into the wind, into the water, against the staggering improbability that it might reach another member of their species. No algorithm, no swipe — just chance.

But then, in the Cretaceous period, flowers appeared and carpeted the world with astonishing rapidity — because, in some poetic sense, they invented love. Once there were flowers, there were fruit — that transcendent alchemy of sunlight into sugar. Once there were fruit, plants could enlist the help of animals in a kind of trade: sweetness for a lift to a mate. Animals savored the sugars in fruit, converted them into energy and proteins, and a new world of warm-blooded mammals came alive. Without flowers, there would be no us.

No poetry.

No science.

No music.

And, suddenly, the flower emerges not as this pretty object to be admired, but as this ravishing system of aliveness — a kind of silent symphony of interconnected resilience.

“Bloom”

Bloom — is Result — to meet a Flower
And casually glance
Would cause one scarcely to suspect
The minor Circumstance
Assisting in the Bright Affair
So intricately done
Then offered as a Butterfly
To the Meridian —
To pack the Bud — oppose the Worm —
Obtain its right of Dew —
Adjust the Heat — elude the Wind —
Escape the prowling Bee
Great Nature not to disappoint
Awaiting Her that Day —
To be a Flower, is profound
Responsibility —

— Emily Dickenson

“birth”

you built a life. under ten moons, you were a house of water. you held a second heart in the arms of your rib cage, dreamed two sets of dreams. merged the rivers of your bloodlines under your skin. and then, in the early hours of a spring morning, i watched a piece of you leave, swallowed in the pain of your shattering. you broke, and the rains of new life poured out of you.

you are now the mother of that dawning ground. the guardian of its soil. the mender of its aching. the gardener of its joy. this is your work now.

you were born in your dying. you were delivered to a new life as you birthed one into existence.

you are utter magic. 

building that mountain.

— Emory Hall

[Title TBD]

The baby came…a little boy, mouth opened like a little bird, a version of me, eyes closed, skin translucent.
My little boy who weighed nothing in my arms — despite the weight I had felt with him inside of me, 
the weight of life, 
the weight of hope, 
the weight of humanity, 
the gravity of my little love story — 
his body was more light than anything else it could have ever been.

I looked at autumn, my favorite season, as I had never seen it before, barren, full of bold promises waiting to die. 
My annual garden, 
dollar-store pots
full of cheerful blooms, 
my geraniums, marigolds, begonias, impatiens, 
could continue living, but I didn’t want them to. 

I stopped watering them. 
I watched them die. 
The blooms withered first, 
then the leaves started drying out in the sun and the strong winds. 

I thought about watering them in those final days, but my heart was so heavy I could not find the strength. 

What did a few more days of bloom matter when in the end, we would all die anyway?

— Kao Kalia Yang

“What We Love?”

We are, in some deep sense, what we love — we become it as much as it 
becomes us, beckoned from our myriad conscious and unconscious longings, 
despairs, and patterned desires. 

A love that seeks anything safe and disposable on earth is constantly 
frustrated, because everything is doomed to die. 

Even if things should last, human life does not. We lose it daily. As we live 
the years pass through us and they wear us out into nothingness. It seems 
that only the present is real, for “things past and things to come are not”; 
but how can the present (which I cannot measure) be real since it has no 
“space”? Life is always either no more or not yet. Like time, life “comes 
from what is not yet, passes through what is without space, and disappears 
into what is no longer.” Can life be said to exist at all? 

— Hannah Arendt – “Love and Saint Augustine”

“Mothers”

there are millions of mothers
that live inside my chest.
i speak to them in quiet moments
under night skies
and in my dreams.

we are the keepers of a forest full of hearts.
the tenders of its fertile soil
the readers of its leaves
the guardians of its wild territory.

sometimes,
we dance together 
drunk on the perfume of
a thousand blossoms of love.

sometimes,
we rub honey on our ribs,
broken from a thousand lifetimes
of heartbreak.

sometimes,
we rest
and forget the weight we carry,
just for a moment.

i meet these mothers in secret
but they teach me everything I know.

— Emory Hall

“In Any Event”

If we are fractured
we are fractured
like stars
bred to shine
in every direction,
through any dimension,
billions of years 
since and hence.

I shall not lament 
the human, not yet.
There is something 
more to come, our hearts
a gold mine
not yet plumbed,
an uncharted sea.

Nothing is gone forever.
If we came from dust
and will return to dust
then we can find our way
into anything.

What we are capable of 
is not yet known,
and I praise us now,
in advance.

–Dorianne Laux

“The Cosmos of the possible”

We live our human lives in the lacuna between truth and meaning, between objective reality and subjective sense making laced with feeling. All of our longings, all of our despairs, all of our reckonings with the perplexity of existence are aimed at one or the other. In the aiming is what we call creativity, how we contact beauty — the beauty of a theorem, the beauty of a sonnet.

— Maria Popova

“come sit by my garden”

let my gardens speak for me when i am gone. let them speak in colored whispers of all the beauty I have seen. and felt. and lived. let them speak of how much death had to find me; how many hard seasons it took to make me a living, breathing thing. let them speak of my seasons of growth and abundance, but let them also tell of my seasons of loss and decay. let the soft, wet earth be a reminder of hardness that didn’t win. of sadness that didn’t calcify. of surrender that triumphed over resistance. and let the glorious, fragrant blooms speak of my life and its greatest lesson: that the beauty we make never dies.

— Emory Hall

“Another Word for Love is Light” 

If we could plant a garden of stars,
reseed the sky to unearth your
root in my pulse and breath in your 
bloom, our ends might begin
to tend heavens within
cell, star, seed
loss and life. Hold this pace
in the dark. Another word for
love is light. Find light in the night.
Always let there be light.

— Gretchen Ernster Henderson

“Searching for Dark Matter” 

For this we go out dark nights, searching
For the dimmest stars,
For signs of unseen things:

To weigh us down.
To stop the universe
From rushing on and on
Into its own beyond
Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,
Its last star going out.

Whatever they turn out to be,
Let there be swarms of them,
Enough for immortality,
Always a star where we can warm ourselves.

Let there be enough to bring it back
From its own edges,
To bring us all so close we ignite
The bright spark of resurrection.

— Rebecca Elson

Key Details

Scoring: SSAA with chamber orchestra, chamber ensemble (of 8 players), or wind symphony (3 different versions of the work)

Length: approx. 45-60 minutes

Text: Various poets, see above accordion

Delivery: The first completed version of the score will be delivered in February 2026, and a revised, final score will be delivered December 1, 2026. Projections will be delivered upon request at minimum 4 weeks before the Sponsors’ performance.

Practice Tracks: Practice tracks are included in the consortium buy-in and will be created by Composer and will be available in 2027. Sponsors may not go through a third-party to create their own tracks.

Rights

Lead commissioners have the exclusive right to give the world premieres of the Work through 2026. All other Sponsors shall have the exclusive right to give the regional premieres of the Work through 2027. Beyond that date, conductors have the non-exclusive right to program these works with the commissioning ensembles in perpetuity.

Reach out to join the consortium and receive a regional premiere of Creation in its first official season in the year 2027.

Deadline to sign up: July 31st, 2026