Song of the Reappeared (2025)

Movements
1. El mar
2. Una ruta en las soledades
3. Rompientes

Composer note
Song of the Reappeared is a concerto for voice and orchestra, a work that features both the soprano soloist and the full orchestra, in all its richness and virtuosity. I composed this piece with two voices in mind: the voice of Julia Bullock, an artist who brings a unique intensity to everything she performs, and the mighty collective voice of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

The text that the soprano soloist sings is drawn from the blazing, visionary poetry of the Chilean writer Raúl Zurita, and the word "reappeared," in the title, refers to the thousands of people who were "disappeared" — that is, murdered — in Chile throughout the repressive regime of the dictator Augusto Pinochet. Zurita was a politically active student poet when Pinochet seized control of the country in 1973, and within days of the coup, the young Zurita was imprisoned and tortured. After he was released, he was banned from entering any bookstore in the country, and in the subsequent decades he found ever more creative ways to share his work with his fellow countrymen, in acts of solidarity and nonviolent defiance: he wrote phrases of poetry out of stones in the Atacama Desert, so that they would be visible from the air; and he once orchestrated the writing of lines of poetry in the sky above New York, using the contrails of multiple airplanes.

About a decade after the end of Pinochet's regime, the Chilean government acknowledged that the bodies of many of the dictatorship's victims had been thrown out of the sky into Chile's oceans, lakes, and mountains. This horrifying revelation made a deep impression on Zurita, ultimately inspiring him to write the book-length poem INRI, both as a memorial to those many lost victims, and also as a potent, surreal vision of resurrection.

The texts of Song of the Reappeared come from this book, which is full of poetry that is positively Biblical in its overflowing musicality, its inexorable cadences, and its images of the return of the dead. It seemed to me that this was poetry that cries out to be set to music. And I found myself invigorated, in the difficult moment we're all living through, by Zurita's conception of art as a nonviolent and life-affirming, yet also unyielding, form of resistance.

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Song of the Reappeared is organized into three movements: a brief, intense first movement; a lyrical second movement that grows from an intimate beginning into vast, expansive musical vistas; and an energetic, righteously joyous finale.

The first movement, "El mar" ("The Sea"), begins with quick, darting gestures in the strings and clarinets, like tiny forms suspended in the sky, hovering, falling. An ominous, percussive pulse undergirds the swirling string texture. The soprano's first words paint a frightening image: "Sorprendentes carnadas llueven del cielo" ("Strange baits rain from the sky"). This "bait" is the bodies of the disappeared, thrown from above into the ocean, reduced to mere fishmeal. In each movement, there is a moment when words fail and the orchestra must take over, and in the first movement this section is a wild, writhing dance.

The lyrical, expansive middle movement, "Una ruta en las soledades" ("A Path in the Solitudes"), features the English Horn as a co-soloist, whose long, songful lines engage in dialogue with the soprano's. Zurita's poetry here seems to be spoken by one of the dead, addressing his beloved, who was also lost: he speaks "as the stones speak, as the earth speaks," mutely, through touch alone, with infinite tenderness.

Near the end of the second movement, the piece's trajectory shifts when the speaker experiences a vision of resurrection: "And I see you! / And looking at me, blind and looking at me...you see me rising and rising and your eyes see my eyes full of earth rising." This vision of the resurrection of the dead leads into the longest instrumental soli in the piece: the brass lead a massive, steady crescendo, like new mountains emerging out of the earth, pointing skyward. A new world becomes briefly, shiningly possible.

The movement ends in an intimate, quiet atmosphere. Zurita's speaker promises the person he loves that, in some world or other, they will be reunited: "And I will love you again...And the flesh we were will cover us again like the mountains with living lava." The English Horn traces a fleeting, evanescent figure, turning a corner and disappearing into nothingness.

If the first movement was a descent, the third and final movement, "Rompientes" ("Breakers"), is an ascension. This is music of return, restoration, resurrection. The Pacific Ocean, with its ferocious, unceasing energy, becomes an emblem of unquenchable, ongoing life: "...because the Pacific was resurrection and the breakers of resurrection beat and thrashed against the mountains."

The music of this last movement is defiant and joyful. The speaker bears witness both to the horrors of the past ("because they threw us into the sea and the fish were the carnivorous tombs of the sea") and also to the reality of an unstoppable, ongoing life force that emanates from the planet itself: "the breakers of resurrection glided above us."

— Matthew Aucoin