We will end the first half of our recital with a set of three songs called I Shall Go West, composed for us in 2024 by the Californian composer Eric Tuan. The composer writes:

I spent many childhood summers and Thanksgiving holidays traveling through the eastern Sierra to visit family. The snow-capped Sierra towering thousands of feet to the west, the arid sage brush of the Great Basin on either side, and the dry peaks of the White and Inyo Mountains rising to the east captivated me during the long hours driving down Route 395. That sense of awe and wonder for this spectacular and unique landscape has never left me.

When my friend and colleague Alice Del Simone asked me to compose a song cycle evoking the California landscape, I knew I wanted to return to the eastern Sierra. One of the preeminent bards of this astonishing place is the writer Mary Hunter Austin, best known for her 1903 evocation of the Owens Valley, The Land of Little Rain.

I Shall Go West sets three of Mary Hunter Austin’s poems. The first two are drawn from The Children Sing in the Far West, a collection of poems drawn from Austin’s experiences teaching school in the small town of Lone Pine. She explains, ‘Partly because I was teaching school and felt obliged to have something for my pupils about the land they lived in, and partly because I loved the land so much I couldn’t bear not having grown up in it, I made most of the poems in this collection with the help of the children in my school.’

Lighter in tone but no less evocative for that, these are two brief character sketches of Owens Valley flora and fauna: the piñon jay, haunt of the ubiquitous piñon pines, and the rabbitbrush which turns the riverbeds yellow in late summer and early fall. The final movement, “I Shall Go West,” poignantly evokes the ways in which the poet will become one with her beloved California landscape after her death.