Here I Am (Full Score-Chamber Ensemble) (download)

Description

Voicing: SATB choir, treble choir, soprano soloist, chamber orchestra, and illuminated portraits
This piece can be performed with chamber orchestra or chamber ensemble.

The chamber ensemble version instrumentation includes:
Clarinet in Bb / Contrabass Clarinet
Bassoon / Contrabassoon

Trumpet in C

Timpani (+ Triangle)
3 Percussionists – Marimba, Glockenspiel, Crash Cymbal,
Suspended Cymbal, Water Gong, Small Gong, Triangle,
Temple Block (low), Bass Drum, 4 log drums (1 high & 3
low), 2 Low Toms, Snare Drum, 3 stations of Glass

Piano
STRINGS (optional double bass)

Duration: 45 minutes

Following the outstanding performances and success of Jocelyn’s first multimedia symphony The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, True Concord commissioned her to create another large-scale work for choir and orchestra the next season, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. (The pandemic delayed its scheduled premieres in both 2020 and 2021.)

Here I Am honors the contributions of women from all over the world, ancient and modern. It serves as a reminder that women continue to fight for equality at home and abroad. As the audience listens they will also see new, original portraits of these amazing women projected above the ensemble. Jocelyn commissioned seven different female portrait artists from around the world to bring life to these women.

1. There is a Girl
2. The Other Side
3. Voting for Ourselves
4. Write the Story

Text:

1. There is a Girl
“I am here as a soldier who has temporarily left the field of battle in order to explain… what civil war is like when civil war is waged by women…I am here as a person who, according to the law courts of my country, it has been decided, is of no value to the community at all: and I am adjudged because of my life to be a dangerous person, under sentence of penal servitude in a convict prison…I do not look either very like a soldier or very like a convict, and yet I am both.

“You won your freedom in America when you had the revolution, by bloodshed, by sacrificing human life. You won the civil war by the sacrifice of human life when you decided to emancipate the negro. You have left it to women in your land, the men of all civilized countries have left it to women, to work out their own salvation… Human life is sacred, but we say if any life is to be sacrificed it shall be ours; we won’t do it ourselves, but we will put the enemy in the position where they will have to choose between giving us freedom or giving us death.

“…So here am I. I come to ask you to help to win this fight. If we win it, this hardest of all fights, then, to be sure, in the future it is going to be made easier for women all over the world to win their fight when their time comes…”
~ Emmeline Pankhurst

“Women were the wombs of society. Through thousands of years of biblical interpretation, law and custom, women, especially married women, simply were not considered entities with rights separate from men’s. It was as if women were part of the furniture in men’s lives. They were expected to remain silent on public matters, and the vast majority of women stayed in their place.

“As a woman who went to school from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, grade school to grad school, I knew little of the suffrage movement and the women behind it. Women received almost no mention in our history books, and women’s studies courses were not in our college catalogs. Even as a feminist, voracious reader, and often reviewer of books in general and history in particular, I had rarely stumbled upon books about women’s roles and contributions.”
~ Angela P. Dodson

“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
~ Virginia Woolf

“Women need not alwyas keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.”
~ Emma Goldman

If we want to know who we were meant to be before the world told us who to be —
If we want to know where we were meant to go before we were put in our place —
If we want to taste freedom instead of control —
Then we must relearn our soul’s native tongue.
~ Glennon Doyle

there is a girl who
sings only when
every window
is shut.
like most girls,
she’s been learning
the trait of silence
since birth.
everyone
underestimates
how important
her voice is,
& the greatest
tragedy of all is
that she does,
too.
~ Amanda Lovelace

“The unspoken assumption is that women are different. They do not have executive ability, orderly minds, stability, leadership skills, and they are too emotional. It is obvious that discrimination exists. Women do not have the opportunities that men do. And women that do not conform to the system, who try to break with the accepted patterns, are stigmatized as ‘odd’ and ‘unfeminine’. The fact is that a woman who aspires to be chairman of the board, or a Member of the House, does so for exactly the same reasons as any man. Basically, these are that she thinks she can do the job and she wants to try.”
~ Shirley Chisholm

“Bias has to be taught. If you hear your parents downgrading women or people of
different backgrounds, why, you are going to do that.”
~ Barbara Bush

“I feel I must fight for [my music], because I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs; not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea.”
~ Ethel Smyth

“Don’t sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them.”
~ Sarah Breedlove

“Any great change must expect opposition, because it shakes the very foundation of privilege.”
~ Lucretia Mott

“It is not the intelligent woman vs. the ignorant woman; nor the white woman vs. the black, the brown, and the red, it is not even the cause of woman vs. man. Nay, tis woman’s strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice.”
~ Anna Julia Cooper

2. The Other Side
Nobody will open the door for you.
Keep banging on it.
On the other side is music. No. It’s
the phone.
You’re wrong.
It’s a noise of machines, electric panting,
hissing, lashes.
No. It’s music.
No. Someone is crying very slowly.
No. It’s a stabbing siren, a huge, steep tongue
licking the empty, colorless sky.
No. It’s fire.
You’re alone on the other side.
They don’t want to let you in.
Look, again, climb, yell. Useless.
You can’t go in. They say.
~ Blanca Varela
(translated by Willis Barnstone and edited by J.H.)

“I hear your voice calling to me in my sleep. I feel your hands at my shoulder, pushing for me to wake. You are afraid. You are angry. You are desperate that I rise. You say my name again and gain. When I open my eyes, it is me I see. When I open my ears, it is me I hear. When I am on my feet, it is our journey that I continue.”
~ Kao Kalia Yang

“We must tell and retell, learn and relearn, these women’s stories, and we must make it our personal mission, in our everyday lives, to pass these stories on to our daughters and sons. Because we cannot – we must not – ever forget that the rights and opportunities that we enjoy as women today were not just bestowed upon us by some benevolent ruler. They were fought for, agonized over, marched for, jailed for and even died for by brave and persistent women and men who came before us… And if we are to finish the work begun here — we must, above all else, take seriously the power of the vote and use it to make our voices heard.”
~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls. Every truth we see is ours to give the world, not to keep for ourselves alone, for in so doing we cheat humanity out of their rights and check our own development.”
~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“You should not be afraid to offend anyone, to question everything, to reinvent yourself and to rethink the world.”
~ Maya Lin

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
~ Audre Lorde

“Don’t let anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.”
~ Toni Morrison

“Humanity, take a good look at yourself. Inside, you’ve got heaven and earth, and all of creation. You’re a world — everything is hidden in you.”
~ Hildegard of Bingen

“Never limit yourself because of others’ limited imagination; never limit others because of your own limited imagination.”
~ Mae Jemison

“It is never too late to mend… We women who are in the background today may be in the lime light tomorrow.”
~ Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti

“A lot of young girls have looked to their career paths and said they’d like to be chief. There’s been a change in the limits people see.”
~ Wilma Pearl Mankiller

“I am fighting for my future. I am here to speak for all generations to come. In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear, I am not afraid of telling the world how I feel.”
~ Severn Cullis-Suzuki

“So here I stand, one girl among many. I speak not for myself, but so those without a voice can he heard. Those who have fought for their rights. Their right to live in peace. Their right to be treated with dignity. Their right to equality of opportunity. Their right to be educated.”
~ Malala Yousafzai

“Don’t just hope for a better life. Vote for one.”
~ Margaret Thatcher

3. Voting for Ourselves
How dare they they they
say say say
anything we can or cannot do with our own
red and blue
We are voting for ourselves
~ Naomi Shihab Nye

“Do not think your single vote does not matter much. The rain that refreshes the
parched ground is made up of single drops.”
~ Kate Sheppard

“Women, wake up; the tocsin of reason sounds throughout the universe; recognize
your rights.”
~ Olympe de Gouges

“Truth is powerful and it prevails.”
~ Sojourner Truth

“You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms.”
~ Anna Akhmatova

“With your strength, my lady, teeth can crush flint.”
~ Enheduanna

We are voting for our pride and our freedom.
We are voting for our children and our rights.
We are voting for the loves of our lives.
We are voting our insight.
Here I am.
See what we can do with our red and blue.
We are voting for ourselves.
~ Jocelyn Hagen

4. Write the Story
“One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience… Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.”
~ Ursula K. Le Guin

“When we deny our stories, they define us. When we run from struggle, we are never free. So we turn toward truth and look it in the eye. We will not be characters in our stories. Not villains, not victims, not even heroes. We are the authors of our lives.”
~ Brené Brown

“When you know someone’s story, it becomes much harder to hate them.”
~ Sarah McBride

“I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.”
~ Frida Kahlo

“To the girls, to the women, to the mothers, to the daughters who hear the music bubbling within — please speak up. We need to hear your voices.”
~ Hildur Gudnadottir

“What I want young women and girls to know is: You are powerful and your voice matters. You’re going to walk into many rooms in your life and career where you may be the only one who looks like you or who has had the experiences you’ve had. But you remember that when you are in those rooms, you are not alone. We are all in that room with you applauding you on. Cheering your voice. And just so proud of you. So you use that voice and be strong.”
~ Kamala Harris

“I was born with a song on my tongue.”
~ Marina Tsvetayeva

“Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.”
~ Ella Fitzgerald

“Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best words, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.”
~ Susan B. Anthony

“Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied.”
~ Millicent Fawcett

“Devote today to something so daring even you can’t believe you’re doing it.”
~ Oprah Winfrey

“My emotions
My intuition
My imagination
My courage
Those are the keys to freedom.
Those are who we are.
Will we be brave enough to unlock ourselves?
Will we be brave enough to set ourselves free?
Will we finally step out of our cages and say to ourselves, to our people, and to the
world:
Here I Am.”
~ Glennon Doyle

“The world has to be ready to listen, and we have to be ready to sing.”
~ Jocelyn Hagen

I have so many stories to tell…
and when you listen to my story
you give birth to my song.
~ Freya Manfred

write the story.
push
your hands
into the dirtiest
parts of yourself.
take the
rot & decay
& turn it into
nourishment & life.
water it
& sing to it
& show it
sunlight.
grow a beautiful garden
from your aching
& teach yourself
how to thrive from it.
write your story.
~ Amanda Lovelace

We are the keepers of the stories
We are the ones who march across the years,
We are the grandmothers, the mothers, the daughters
who rise against the odds,
who persevere against the fears.
We will be the ones standing together with words the world
won’t hear from our lips, raised high in our hands.
We will be the ones marching down the ragged roads of history,
paving it for generations to come,
So that women, all women, may discover that words silenced
do not die and feet halted do not fall.
~ Kao Kalia Yang

We are made of hope, we are made of song.
~ Julia Klatt Singer

* Much care was taken in the preparation of this libretto, seeking and paying for all the
necessary and appropriate permissions for this work.