Strange Land — Program

• Musicians

• Texts & Artwork

The music sets modern and ancient Psalms for choir, tenor soloist, and chamber ensemble augmented with electronic sounds. A waking nightmare: a dawning climate crisis, the specter of societal collapse, forced migration, and deep spiritual introspection across the epochs. This concert event is accompanied by images etched into huge copper plates, printed in the traditional manner, enlarged to colossal proportions and projected in minute detail.

Strange Land was composed by Gregory W. Brown, featuring texts by Todd Hearon and etchings by Brian D. Cohen, and was premiered by Nightingale Vocal Ensemble, Benjamin Perry, dir., on September 23, 2026 at the Boston Museum of Science, Mugar Omni Theater, and September 24, 2026, at the Goel Center for Theater and Dance, Phillips Exeter Academy, with members of the Juventas New Music Ensemble and Jonas Budris, tenor.

This project is supported in part by the David Hoose Commissioning Grant from Choral Arts New England.

1. Psalm:1 (Todd Hearon, from Strange Land)

An echo seeking out the voice that sent it
have I sought for you who are
intimate as air the listener’s breath
catches in the cavern’s mouth
when I imagine you have made my name
ring out
in darkness back through dark
to gather me and draw me in
the silence where my stillness says
you swim

2. In Those Days (Hearon)

To have lived is not enough for them...
To be dead is not enough for them.
                      — Beckett

Light reared its glassine house

and onion skin of hours we looked through
as through a soap filmed pane
on frost encrusted fields.

So we inhabited ourselves
as strangers, eyes trained to a lighted screen

in Plato’s cave
day’s images
flickering on our brows and chins—

lust and conquest, a single severed breast
floating by like the face of Orpheus
his lips a nipple pursed on the remembered

consequence of song.

Was this the day that our desire had made?
Was this its end? Those evenings we burned down
with oil and camphor, leaving not an ash—

What matter.
Dawn would raise them up again
in tall translucent panels

as though they had been peeled from our own skin.

3. Psalm 8:3&4 (King James Bible)

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

4. World’s End (Hearon)

So to return to that sun-drenched skeleton of land, my love, and find
nothing more evident, no less elusive than it was before: monotonous
wind

pulled across ailing embers in a ditch
the sea seeps in, a mess of clothes and feathers, bones and such

dunes. The dunes’ sparse winter grasses.
White sand striated by the stylus trace

of crab- or turtle claw, through which we move
again like tourists on the outmost groove

of a Zen garden discovered in the wilderness—
nothing to dwell on, nothing to express.

And still the high-flung hammering of gulls,
still the mollusk wrenched into its shivering pool,

pools among the rocks, rocks along a coast that cooled
an age ago, upon a different Earth: a world

of fire and frenzy, what a ball it was,
come down to coals the wind picks over. Us.

5. Psalm:2 (Hearon)

Pardon my presumption I want to live
forever
as everyone does once
not granting your last grace may be
death enough to die eternally
What a hell we’ve made of earth forgive us
What a hell made of each other
The hubris
to have failed at life
to hope to fail at death

6. De Profundis (Hearon)

1
What we have not heard
will never help us. What we have not seen
by now will never save. The city

drowned under winter sunlight like a bad
migraine, the bars shut down,
hint of a pandemic in the air, in wind

invisible, the guess and gust of wings.
The pigeons have come home to die.
There are corpses floating in the trees.

2
There are corpses floating in the trees.
High clouds roll over as on holiday.
The sun, impassive as a president,

palters for time and tide. Once we could pray
with honest hunger for whatever life
drew from its magician’s hat;

now rabbits sicken on the mutant vine
and hunger is our habitat.
We are hungry. We have never been so hungry.

3
What we have not followed
leads us now. What follows is a thing we never
dreamed. Prisoners storm the empty coliseum.

In its cage, the gaunt heart screams.
Beneath ground, gears and levers
issue another victim to the light.

The trapdoor opens: thunder
erupts like anesthetic through the night.
The bars swing open. We have all gone under.

7. De Profundis (trans. from Latin by Thomas Wyatt)

From depth of sin and from a deep despair,
From depth of death, from depth of heart’s sorrow,
From this deep cave of darkness deep repair,
Thee have I called, O Lord, to be my borrow;
Thou in my voice, O Lord, perceive and hear
My heart, my hope, my plaint, my overthrow,
My will to rise: and let by grant appear
That to my voice Thine ears do well intend.
No place so far that to Thee is not near;
No depth so deep that Thou ne mayst extend
Thine ear thereto: hear then my woeful plaint.

8. Psalm:3 (Hearon)

But if as it is said there is to be
another Earth a second heaven
and men move through it as in days of old
stalwart rejoicing
O unrestrict your will
unlike you have done
so mercifully with us
to let us choose
impassively
resignedly our own
annihilation
Why when we cracked did you not shatter us
and start anew
another Earth a second heaven
if what they say be true 

9. Revelation 8:10

The third angel sounded his trumpet,
and a great star, blazing like a torch,
fell from the sky on a third of the rivers
and on the springs of water—

10. Strange Land (Hearon)

It goes without saying
a word: the world under cover
of midnight snow, what we have known

of pageantry and lilac, leaf and song
subsumed in starless silence.
Waking at dawn into the tremulous blue

of the room, as in earth’s afterglow,
we lie, lidless, listening, as crows
call out the ear’s horizons.

What year is it? Into what country were we born
and now must make our way? Outside the pane
the stillness feels ancestral but the ghosts

not yours, not mine. My émigré,
we are cut off. An ocean to the east
churns in chiaroscuro while unseen

ranges to the south deflect our passage,
what passage might have been.
This country seems the passing of a dream

to a moonscape’s still immitigable white,
a land’s amnesia where against the sky
three needling black birds fly

and slip like an ellipsis out of sight.

11. Psalm 137: 1-4

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song;
and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

[echoed in multiple languages]

12. After the Flood (Hearon)

We wondered, being human, what we’d done
to deserve it, even then not comprehending
the hubris in assuming something
human at the root. The skies

opened. That was all.
A wall of water fell. If it had been
our judgement we’d have judged it at the least
sufficient. It was not.

So dead we are returned
as rain to tell you all
we ascertained too late:
the earth was not enough.

13. Psalm:4 (Hearon)

Others have praised you that you are
unattributable
which is only to assign
you yet another attribute
I say
nothing but wait by day by night
till the nothing that you are be blotted out

14. What Is Man That Thou Art Mindful of Him (Hearon)

Man is a weapon of mass destruction.
Eliminate man you don’t eliminate
the Problem. As dog to its own filth, so man returns

a swarm, a fungus, feeding on destruction —
as when a child I fed upon my dreams
adrift in a pool rainbowed with chemicals

a child already dead, intent on death.
Think of the thousands I marshaled to destruction
five hundred years, having fed upon the earth

(there is no better rhyme with death than earth)—
I tore the heart from Montezuma’s bride.
I saw Bikini as a nippled blast.

Moon rises at moth rise. I dream a jungle
from my fruitless cot. I dream my father
spidering the walls of the house in anger.

I think back to my mother. I think
I was a man, born on earth of woman.
Woman is a weapon of mass destruction.

I sleep. I dream my feudal fruitless wars.
I dream of peace the dovewhite dawn explodes.
Man is a weapon of mass destruction.
I know this now. Man’s the best rhyme for war.

15. Psalm:5 (Hearon)

Forgive me my vanishing that most of all
I presumed to be of durable use
your words in my voice your works in my hand
in ignorance and arrogance I bore
forward only error

but let that lie
And let me dwell in the dark of your memory forever