Everything That Ever Was (2022)

Composer note
Commissioned by baritone Will Liverman and soprano Renée Fleming, Everything That Ever Was sets a poem by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, from her Pulitzer-prize winning collection, Life on Mars. The song imagines a couple negotiating the weight of human history as it relates to their relationship in the present: “Like a wide wake, rippling/Infinitely into the distance, everything/That ever was still is, somewhere/Floating near the surface, nursing/Its hunger for you and me/And the now we’ve named/And made a place of.”

— Sarah Kirkland Snider