Earthly Echoes

Earthly Echoes celebrates the beauty, wonder, and fragility of the natural world through music by four living composers. Presented just before Earth Day, the program reflects on our relationship with the earth, the creatures that inhabit it, and our shared responsibility to preserve the environments in which life flourishes.

Caroline Shaw’s and the swallow adapts words from Psalm 84, drawing particular attention to the swallow and the dwelling place it finds within the sacred text. Ēriks Ešenvalds’s Rivers of Light turns toward the sky, offering an enchanting musical vision of light inspired by the Northern Lights.

In All is Miracle, Kyle Pederson invites us to view the world through “wonder-tinted lenses.” The work encourages us to recognize the miraculous in both the magnificent and the seemingly ordinary—and to encounter the world with curiosity, gratitude, and a sense of sacred energy.

The program culminates in Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered, a large-scale, six-movement work combining texts from the Latin Mass with original words by Nathaniel Bellows. Written as a prayer for endangered animals and the fragile environments in which they live, the work will be performed with chamber orchestra and accompanied by video art created by Deborah Johnson.

Together, these works invite us to listen more closely to the world around us—from the flight of a swallow and the glow of the Northern Lights to the vulnerable habitats that sustain life. Earthly Echoes offers a musical meditation on wonder, preservation, and the profound connections shared by all living things.