Resonance Ensemble’s Artistic Director Katherine FitzGibbon (Photo: Nina Johnson)

This article originally appeared in Issue 50:1 (Sept/Oct 2026) of Fanfare Magazine.

Feature Article by Colin Clarke

Few new releases impress on multiple levels as much as Resonance Ensemble’s Safe Harbor. As you can read below in my interview with Resonance Ensemble’s Artistic Director Katherine FitzGibbon, this is a sequence of choral pieces that work on various levels, from community through dialog with other art forms, through coming to peace with our past to create a brighter future. On top of that, the performance standard is exceptional, so we delve into some aspects of that, too …

Dr. FitzGibbon, you are founder of Resonance Ensemble, and its Artistic Director. One of the accompanying notes to your release Safe Harbor talks of Resonance Ensemble changing its mission from broad-spectrum repertoire to acting as an agent for social change. Could you elaborate, and just what that shift meant in terms of focus, and how your members work? Please feel free to integrate into your answer the choir’s social work and how you see music as mattering in a fractured world—what do you think music can say that hasn’t already been said in words? That it speaks directly to the heart?

When I first started Resonance in 2009, my goal was to connect choral music with other art forms, putting music in dialogue with visual art, storytelling, dance, and so on. Our mission still prizes collaboration with artists across genres and art forms; our concerts always involve visual imagery, readings, and other immersive artistic ideas.

But in 2016–17, we were bombarded with overtly racially and gender-biased rhetoric in U.S. politics. As an organization, we started thinking about the ways we might use choral music to be an opposing force, a creative force. Many music lovers know firsthand the ways that music’s deep listening helps enable emotional receptivity to another perspective. We decided it was time to rewrite our mission to focus our efforts on creating concerts that spark meaningful social change, and that vocal music was the perfect vehicle for making an impact in our community.

Since then, we have commissioned more than one new work every year, and in some cases, some really significant works like Damien Geter’s African American Requiem, for full choir, orchestra, and soloists. For many of these vocal works, we have also commissioned new texts to share stories that haven’t been centered in classical music before. We hope that part of our legacy will be a significant body of choral music that shares new perspectives in innovative ways.

We’re seeing this helping to create change in our own community already. Some audience members have told us that they wept because they felt “seen” by having their own experiences described poetically and set to music. In other cases, audience members have learned about an experience other than their own—say, addiction, or prejudice, or transphobia—and felt so moved by the music and poetry that they felt called to take action. We typically partner with a local organization that is working to address an issue or support a group of individuals whose stories we are centering, and then that organization attends the concert and helps provide audience members with concrete actions they can take to have an impact. So it’s not just a matter of moving people and then sending them back to their daily lives, but rather giving them something constructive to do with that impulse.

The album is divided into two parts: REflect and REimagine. Let’s take them one by one: the first allows for listeners to explore histories—as you put it, “moments that shape us, stories that deserve to be told, and the challenges we carry forward.”

Yes—we were excited to create this double album of works that we have commissioned since our mission changed. We realized that these commissions have powerful texts that tended to fall into two categories—they either are helping tell stories that are part of our shared history, or they are dreaming of a new future.

And the REimagine part? An imagining of a very different future, where “voices unheard are once more honoured” and, importantly, where “music inspires action and connection”?

Yes, we think of the music here as a catalyst for action. We hope that listeners will be moved by these ways of imagining a more just future and feel inspired to build that in their own communities.

So we can only embrace a positive future by examining and absorbing our past?

That’s right, and in fact, in Darrell Grant’s work From the Book of Sankofa, that idea encapsulates the thesis of the work—the idea of “Sankofa,” a Twi word from the Akan tribe in Ghana meaning “go back and get it.” It has a famous visual symbol of a bird with its head facing backward, which people use to represent the idea of looking back at our past to learn from it and move forward. I love what Darrell wrote in his program note: “It encourages us to remember the struggles and triumphs of our ancestors, and to use that knowledge in our pursuit of a better future.”

The excellence of the performances is evident everywhere, right from the oh-so-tight ensemble of “We Are Murmurs,” the first track—would you like to explain this piece?

I absolutely love We Are Murmurs, and I’m excited to share Cecille Elliott’s work with the world. She’s a brilliant composer, with a background that spans classical violin, jazz voice, and close harmony singing, and many other styles. She writes her own texts, too, and they have such vulnerability and interpersonal truth.

Cecille is talking about an experience of sudden grief. She doesn’t specify what kind of grief, which lets all of us, I think, empathize with aspects of the song. At one point, she shared that it’s about the notion of not being ready for change, but having change come anyway. The text keeps repeating the idea that we “keep on separating from each other.” It has some real pain built in.

I love the way Cecille has this tight, tuneful arrangement with such a catchy pulse. You can’t escape the pulse. I can’t hold still when I listen to it. But I think that’s a way of showing how magnetic the pull to “keep on separating from each other” can be.

Also the first track introduces the recording—on headphones, the sound is spacious, but the actual locations of the voices are exactly locatable. Sopranos seem to be on both right and left, with male voices in the front. What was the strategy behind the mic placement, mixing, and so on?

Yes! You’ll hear that the soprano and alto often carry the melody and the text, while the tenor, baritone, and bass often have more of an accompaniment idea. So you’ll hear the treble voices across from one another (practically speaking, it also meant that they could have eyes on each other the whole time to get that incredibly aligned sound), and the lower voices in the middle. Of course, when they all have the text in the middle, it’s such an arrival moment: “Bury our history, make it a mystery, and we’ll keep separating from each other.” And then the voices do separate again!

It occurs to me, it’s like the reverse of the “Sankofa” idea—like a cautionary tale. If you bury your history, you’ll just keep separating from each other again and again—that’s not the recipe for human connection!

So to “There’s a Man Goin’ Round,” a spiritual arranged by Damien Geter which also is the beginning of the “Liber scriptus” of Geter’s African American Requiem? It’s very powerful, both in terms of embracing feminism and in its reference to violence currently in the U.S. (we have a fair amount in the U.K., too, sadly, but more knives than guns here). Firstly, why do you think spirituals speak so powerfully, both as stand-alone entities, and within concert music (I think of Tippett’s A Child of our Time, for example)?

Damien Geter has been doing extremely high-profile commissions around the United States of late, both in the opera and orchestra worlds, but before that, he lived in Portland and was a member of Resonance Ensemble, served on our board during our mission change, and was our Artistic Advisor. Damien was a huge part of helping us define who we wanted Resonance to be, and then writing new music that let us live those principles. He’s moved to Chicago now, but he will always be part of the Resonance family! I’m so glad that a number of his commissions are featured on this album.

One of the first pieces he wrote for Resonance Ensemble to sing was this a cappella arrangement of the spiritual “There’s a Man Goin’ Round.” Spirituals are a powerful part of the United States’s history; they were written and shared by African Americans during the time of slavery and have been passed down across generations. There are many different types of spirituals; some remind us to hold on to hope for the future—for freedom, for heaven. Some have encoded messages that were telling listeners how to escape to freedom. Over the last 150 years, they have become part of the Civil Rights era, part of protest marches, and now, with various arrangements, part of our concert repertoire. They always provide an opportunity to reflect on parts of our history that we don’t want to repeat.

So, Damien arranged this spiritual first as the stand-alone a cappella arrangement that you hear on this album. Later, it was the introduction to the “Liber scriptus” in his African American Requiem, which is especially appropriate, as that movement in the Requiem talks about being added to the book of names, while the spiritual “There’s a Man Goin’ Round” talks about how Death is “goin’ round, takin’ names.” Damien uses spirituals in the African American Requiem, along with a number of newer texts and musical influences from the African diaspora, layered into the traditional Latin Requiem mass. I feel like a great analog is Britten’s War Requiem. For me, when I hear the way Damien uses spirituals in the African American Requiem, it reminds me that this is our musical heritage and our country’s history, and that it’s speaking to me today through Damien’s voice and through this tradition.

Two tropes seem very powerful here: the sudden unison/octave statement, and the soaring soprano lines that are at once decorative (if you put them under a Schenkerian microscope, for example), but so much more than that in their Affekt. What else do you think gives this music its individuality, both in pure musical signature and in the response to the text?

Damien’s a cappella arrangement really captures, I think, the heart of what makes this spiritual so compelling. The tune has a kind of yearning, arc-ing shape, and Damien plays on the devastating idea that Death is coming for all of us—our brother, our sister, our father, our mother—by writing an arrangement that emphasizes an aspect of this tune each verse. It opens with a single soloist singing the melody in its simplest form (the wonderful Onry [a mononym] on the solo), and then has a second verse where the choir comes in underneath the solo, echoing the soloist, but also adding the creepiest added augmented fourth to introduce a kind of horror about this. The next verse plays on how Death is “coming ’round” with a literal round, a canonic expression of the text. And the last verse is the one that you mention—a sudden unison/octave statement that seems to emphasize that this is something we are all experiencing together. It re-starts the text and then layers the incredible soaring solo voices above the choir, like a keening, mournful statement.

There is more Geter in The Talk: Instructions for Black Children when they Interact with the Police. Again, there is a sudden break—here, of the loss of babies through ill-health, premature birth, or lost/unseen stories seems to raise their head above the parapet again, as if their time is ripe. This is a core tenet of the album, right? Making the invisible—or deliberately ignored—visible?

Yes! We had a concert about some of the unseen aspects of parenthood, including infant loss, or the birth of children with heart conditions. And I asked Damien if he knew of any repertoire that spoke to this aspect of parenthood for Black parents—giving their children “The Talk” about what to do if they are pulled over by the police. He and I both scoured the repertoire and found nothing, and he said, “You know what this means, don’t you? It means I’m going to write it.”

And you’re exactly right—this is exactly what we’re trying to do with this album and with Resonance’s mission. Every Black parent we’ve talked to has had this conversation with their children, and yet, a lot of people outside the Black community, until relatively recently, were often unaware of this—or chose to be unaware.

The text is what to do if pulled over by the police—“keep your hands where they can see them” for example (illustrated by clapping, which is clever!). There is, though, a lightness to the music—how does that fit in with the text?

I see the clapping as having a sharp, almost performative quality to it—like, look, here are my hands, I am doing what you asked of me. I’m furious, and terrified, but I’m doing something that looks more benign on the outside.

How do you see the inserted line “Be polite, Save your rage”—an interpolation credited to Jasmine Love?

I love this line. It’s not saying, “Don’t feel your rage.” It’s OK to be angry. But save the outward expression of your anger until you’re in a safe place for that. In the moment, when your life can depend on it, your outward expression must stay neutral and calm.

The repetitions in this piece aren’t quite a mantra, but there is certainly a slightly hypnotic aspect to them. They head toward a major-mode conclusion after a minor-mode opening to the piece—but would you say that arrival to a haven is only temporary? If so, do you find that reflected in the music?

The final part of the piece gives us a view of what the parent is feeling underneath these instructions. The soloist sings about how she knew from the time she held her baby that they were going to need to have this talk, and she just has to repeat this entreaty to “get home safe.” That’s the fundamental need: to protect your child. It’s the heartbeat of this piece. And it’s not something you can guarantee.

Darrell Grant’s From the Book of Sankofa takes in ancestral wisdom via memory as a key to giving hope to the future—the key to understanding the now is via the past. The subtitle is “Words she would have us know”: Mission, Essence, Reflection, Progress, Reimagine, Channel, Dignity, Migrate, Reincarnate, Piety, Reverence, Stir. A solo cello represents the flight of the sacred Sankofa bird … Stylistically, this piece has a wide range of reference, from jazz to Ravel, from Herbie Hancock to Schubert. What are the interpretative challenges of this stylistic reach? Over and above this, the piece exists as a narrative arc, so do you see the references under one overall harmonic umbrella/composer fingerprint?

Composer Darrell Grant wrote this with poet A. Mimi Sei, and they initially sat down to brainstorm about key ideas they wanted to serve as pillars in creating the piece, as a kind of thought exercise to inform their process. But then they loved these 12 words, and Darrell ended up keeping them as touchpoints in the finished composition. The piece takes the listener through those ideas, which also shape the musical language Darrell writes in each section. They’re also the reason for the subtitle, “Words she would have us know.”

Darrell is another musician who lives in many musical styles. He’s a renowned jazz pianist, and you hear his jazz-informed harmonic language throughout. We felt like we were rehearsing a great jazz horn section at certain points! And it meant that we made interpretive decisions that were informed by all of the stylistic references that you mentioned. Darrell was clear that this isn’t solely a jazz piece, but rather something that synthesizes a wide array of personal musical influences.

Again, the recording of the spoken words is very close (especially the single word “Return,” or so it seems when one hears it); Diction, too, is superb—I didn’t need the printed texts. How high a priority is this word-intelligibility for you?

Thanks for saying that! We absolutely prioritize diction and attention to the meaning of the text—in other words, not just enunciation, but which words really matter, and how we can shape the phrases to ensure that the text is paramount. Shohei Kobayashi conducted this work in its premiere and on the recording, and Shohei took incredible care with the text and the phrasing to be sure this all comes across.

Damien Geter’s After Time has Gnawed is to a text by James DePreist, perhaps better known as a conductor—I didn’t know he was a poet!

Yes! James DePreist was a Portland icon, too, as the decades-long conductor of the Oregon Symphony. I came across a book of his poetry in a bookstore here, and I mentioned this poem to Damien. We worked with DePreist’s widow Ginette to have the rights to set this poem to music, and she ended up coming to watch us record it!

Artists flourish in times of adversity, and the pandemic was no exception. There is a beautiful backstory to After Time has Gnawed Away the Shield of Dreams—would you like to relate it?

During the pandemic, we were looking for ways we could still make music together, and we realized that we could record new works outdoors. We filmed a video series in 2020–21 called Under the Overpass that had our Resonance singers coming together to perform safely, masked and six feet apart, under some of Portland’s iconic bridges. This work was the final installment of the series. It was so affirming to be able to create new art together, even during this challenging time.

Damien and I really loved how James DePreist’s text refers to a time when time has “gnawed away the shield of dreams / and placed at risk dreaming,” when hope seems lost—and yet reminds us that such a time can be the prelude to a phoenix song, an opportunity for rebirth. We had hope that the pandemic would yield to a time of change and transformation for our society.

Also, could you relate how it is dedicated to the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, which I believe extended over two days?

We were releasing this world premiere commission video in June 1921, one hundred years after the Tulsa Race Massacre, when white supremacists attacked Black families and businesses in what was known as “Black Wall Street,” murdering dozens of individuals at the least (the full toll isn’t known) and putting thousands into the hospital. More than 35 square blocks were burned and destroyed.

Here we were in the midst of a 21st-century racial reckoning after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in our country, and countless other stories still happening every day. This was a way of honoring the victims of the massacre before but also pointing to the need to grapple with the history—and the present day—of racial violence in our country.

The combination of choir, flute, and piano and the poem is wonderful—and very carefully positioned on the page (particularly at “dreaming” and “a phoenix song”). How do you feel the music reflects the poem’s structure?

Oh, completely—the thorny chromatic writing at the beginning, when the dream has been “placed at risk,” is replaced ultimately with the completely diatonic and hopeful “phoenix song.” It’s such a great tune, too—even just thinking about the text gets that amazing line stuck in my head! And I agree with you about that moment at the word “dreaming”—such gorgeous text- painting.

The sixth track is the titular track: Safe Harbor by Joe Kye, a name new to me, I must admit. The idea is that of safety in asylum? This is a very personal work for Kye, who integrates both Korean and American elements into his music … it begins with a (remembered) Korean Lullaby. The work is subdivided into clear sections, the second a reflection of what it means to leave a homeland, the third a message of hope told in word singularities against a slow pizzicato moto perpetuo. Fabulously inventive and effective: the title is at the core of your disc’s ethos, but the music is as well? The techniques employed, the way the composer reflects the text in the music?

Again, if this album helps spread the word about some of these incredible composers, that’s part of our goal! Joe Kye is a beloved Portland-based composer. I love that you characterize his writing as “fabulously inventive,” which is exactly right—he combines solo violin with electronic looping, uses solo voice and choral textures, and combines influences from both countries and multiple styles. The title and the ideas are absolutely at the heart of this album’s ethos, and yes, I think that a number of our commissioned composers find really personal ways to set the text using a type of creative and personal merging of multiple genres and influences.

Jasmine Barnes (text Sonya Renee Taylor) offers Normal Never Was: you took this as the theme for your 2020/1 season? The “pre-corona existence” idea, and the idea that a reset of sorts is available, is set in a very light way: deliberately masking the larger issues? Or is the joy from the sense of liberation from norms? The final line, incidentally, is very powerful (“We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment, / one that fits all of humanity and nature”).

We have performed this piece a number of times now, and it’s amazing how the audience often chuckles along with it. Jasmine wanted to use both vocal jazz techniques and West African drumming influences to have a light, rhythmically driven approach for the part of the song that’s portraying the “pre-corona existence.” I think of it as a superficial/glossy sheen on our previous “normal,” where we normalized greed, inequality, and environmental harm for the sake of our own convenience, ignoring the ways that it was problematic and actually harming our society. So, we’re just bopping around in this jazzy way as if nothing is wrong. But then the text, by writer/activist Sonya Renee Taylor, reminds us of the cost of the old “normal,” and we resolve that “we should not long to return.” And then that phenomenal solo trio with Cecille Elliott (the composer of “We Are Murmurs”), Shohei Kobayashi, and Cecily Kiester affirms that “we are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment,” and there’s almost a mystical quality to the way Jasmine sets “one that fits all of humanity and nature.” And she leaves us with just a hint of the initial jazz bop, as if to say, the choice is ours!

Mari Esabel Valverde’s (composer) and Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi’s “We Hold Your Names” honors transwomen of color whose lives have been unjustly taken. The singing of names is incredibly powerful, especially as there is a sense of the additive, both as name follows name, but also in terms of crescendo.

We were part of a consortium of choirs that commissioned Mari Esabel Valverde to write this piece, and I spoke a lot with Mari and with Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi about their creative collaboration. Lady Dane wrote the poetic part of the text, and Mari researched the names and stories of trans women of color who had been murdered in the previous year. When we premiered this work in video form during the pandemic, we also researched each of the names we were lifting up in song, so that we got to know their stories through their loved ones and chosen family. You can watch the video online to learn more about each of the people the song memorializes.

Kimberly R. Osberg’s (text Dr S. Renee Mitchell) Seek What You Want To Find contains an extraordinary bridge: between Nazi Germany and the shooting of George Floyd via the paintings of Henk Pander (who has firsthand experience of both). Musical references to “Wade in the Water” take on huge resonance. Can you explain how the music handles this, and the challenges for performance? The sense of dialogue between vocal groups? What do you feel the use of strings brings to this piece? And what about the ambiguity of the close? Over a “long sustain,” different strands come through …

This is the first of three works on the album that were part of a concert we called “Portland Protests,” which looked back at the racial justice protests in Portland in 2020, just three years later. We felt aware that we were helping document and reflect on an important moment in history, when it was still in our very recent memory. And then to have the exhibition of Henk Pander’s paintings was extraordinary timing, connecting Henk’s own experiences in Nazi Germany and his witnessing the militarized response to the protests in Portland. We all knew people who had been injured by our own National Guard, or taken away in unmarked vans.

So, Resonance commissioned three composers and three poets to write new works, and conductor Shohei Kobayashi took the composers and poets to the Pander exhibition to start thinking about these themes and histories. Then, the poets each wrote a poem speaking to an aspect of the protests or their experiences of them, and the composers chose one of the three poems to set. (Fascinatingly, each composer was drawn most to a different poem, so it felt like it was meant to be!)

Dr. S. Renee Mitchell’s poem engages closely with the Pander paintings and connects them to Oregon’s history of segregation and the long-term struggles of the Black community through the reference to the spiritual “Wade in the Water.” And I love Kimberly Osberg’s composition, with its soaring lines that feel like they take the vibrant brush strokes of Pander’s oil paintings and turn them into sheer melody.

It’s a big ask to set the Agnus Dei given its place in the Christian liturgy—Geter again—and again from the African American Requiem (which holds 19 movements in total). Does the movement suffer from extrapolation, do you think? Or even gain in strength?

In the context of the African American Requiem, this moment is incredibly moving. After the significant choir and orchestra texture throughout the work, suddenly the orchestra and soloists drop out to feature the choir, a cappella. So, by contrast, it feels especially personal and deeply human. On the album, it’s almost the opposite—the piece gives the choir the opportunity to sing fully with an operatic sound. Either way, it really gets your attention! And I love the way that Damien’s soaring legato melody lines contrast with agitated layered textures in the second section, so it really showcases Damien’s sense of drama. It highlights the text as a heartfelt plea for mercy.

Judy Rose’s “Re-flec” (text Vin Shambry) is a meditation on many things, including the power of naming—and of the names themselves (those taken before their time are named in the text). Again, very spatial recording! A real sense of narration here, and atmospherics … could you perhaps explain the title and go from there to a broader appreciation of the piece than I can muster?!

This is another piece where the text could be the thesis of the album. Vin’s poetry uses the idea of reflection as a mantra, urging the listener to listen closely to this person’s experience: “Re-flec. Re-flec.” Vin is asking us to think about the way Black people have been dehumanized in this country. And Judy creates this incredible musical language that blends hip-hop and her deep knowledge of choral music, adding spoken word with the soloist Onry.

Finally, Kenji Bunch’s Shout Out! (text A. Mimi Sei), which includes percussion instruments played by members of the chorus to simulate a march. The poem speaks of collectiveness: but starts with a single voice that is added to, gradually, and while the music plays with texture, throughout it is luminous, the end eminently satisfying (on the word “harmony”). This offers hope—so how do you see this hope manifesting?

I love Kenji’s slow build from the individual to the collective, which very much mirrored what was happening in Portland in 2020. There we were, fully isolated from one another, and yet finding these ways to come together to stand up for what we believe in. And yes, I love the way Kenji ends the work! After the joyful rhythmic section that we all sing in harmony together, when he actually sets the final word “harmony,” he does so in an utterly tender unison. We are in harmony; we are one. There is strength because we are listening deeply to each other, coming together, and creating overtones that are only possible because of this perfect alignment.

I imagine this last was very satisfying to sing?

Absolutely. It feels like we go from a sort of ecstatic groove together to something that feels almost sacred. I hope that listeners can feel how much we listen to one another there, and how much we felt that we shared a connection. It felt quietly strong and hopeful.

This article originally appeared in Issue 50:1 (Sept/Oct 2026) of Fanfare Magazine.

There is so much to admire about this release, both on a moral/ethical level of inclusion/exclusion, immigration, and “home” and much more (see interview above), and from the performative aspect. The close (but not invasive) recording supports Resonance Ensemble’s preternatural exactitude of execution. The very first track seems designed to illustrate all of this: Cecille Elliott’s We Are Murmurs (2023), launched by melodious humming before the first line (“We are murmurs calling out”). The words, by the composer, are inspirational (“we are starlight,” for example) couched in contemporary five-part jazz. Words are completely intelligible, always, something which is a Resonance core trait.

The two discs have different focuses: the first, REflect, so a looking back; the second, REimagine, offering possible, brighter futures. Part of the first disc’s reflection is the Spiritual: Damien Geter’s version of “There’s A Man Goin’ Round” is powerful. These are ominous lyrics (“There’s a man goin’ round taking names …He has taken my mother’s name”). Geter layers lines, juxtaposing that with either solo voice or unison choral statements. The mononymical Onry is the male soloist, absolutely superb, ably supported and elaborated on by Madeline Ross. The performance could not be more heartfelt. An extension of those lyrics, perhaps, is found in the very next item, The Talk. The above interview explains this poignantly: The full title is The Talk: Instructions for black children when they interact with the police. The setting is clever: “Keep your hands where they can see then” is illustrated by clapping (something which would be doubtless even more effective in live performance when one can see the performers). Nicole Joseph is a powerful soloist here.

The Book of Sankofa, Part One: Words She Would Have Us Know features its librettist, A. Mimi Sei, as speaker. Sankofa is a Ghanaian word of complex meaning, a return to roots, a Rückblick to illuminate the future, perhaps. An instrumental aspect underlines the choral activity, while a solo cello (Nancy Ives) adds a certain poignancy. The speaker is closely placed: the message cannot be missed. Musically, this is not the most inspired piece on the release, however: it seems rather word-bound, painting from moment to moment. While the sentiment is more than laudable, to reach back to our ancestors for wisdom, this quarter-hour piece carries less emotive punch than each of the three before it. The piece does segue nicely into the vocal/instrumental aggregate that opens Geter’s After Time Has Gnawed Away the Shield of Dreams, out of which Geter’s voice emerges. Scored for choir comprising 16 voices, flute, and piano, and with words by James DePreist, the piece flows from section to section beautifully, mixing thorny harmonies with the most beautiful delineated song. Sopranos are superb when asked to be mobile; flute curlicues enhance the whole. A lovely, powerful piece in which narration also plays a part (Maria Collinsworth, Cecily Kiester, and Dereau K. Farrar, speakers).

The final track of the first disc is the titular Safe Harbor by Joe Kye. The piece, which centers on immigration, is clearly personal: Kye himself is an immigrant from Korea. A lullaby from the composer’s mother inspires the music; instrumental plucked sounds and pentatonic melodies usher us into Korean territory. The piece acts as summary of the release’s concerns and as a distillation of the essence of it. Maria Collinsworth is superb in her solos, while the way other voices join her at “Remember me” and “don’t forget me” is highly effective. This is a poignant, musically rich close to the first disc, perfectly realized, not least in the isolated single words in the choir against pizzicato and arco strings. This is a stunning work, and a finer performance is unimaginable.

… and so to REimagine: alternative paths, brighter futures. The upbeat Normal Never Was is immediately engaging. Scored for SATB choir, Jasmine Barnes’s 2020 setting of Sonya Renee Taylor moves from boppy to an exploration of the normalization of greed. Mari Esabel Valverde’s We Hold Your Names Sacred is an incredibly touching piece of music that is part of the Social Justice movement. The names of transgender sisters of color who have been taken are listed: the effect is unforgettable. Harmony is expressively used, with notable arrival points underlined by piano (Hannah Brewer, whose contributions throughout are ever-sensitive). The work was commissioned by Resonance Ensemble in conjunction with an exhibition of the paintings of Henk Pander (which depicted scenes in the wake of the murder of George Floyd) and also with an historic flood that devastated an area occupied mainly by people of color. S. Renee Taylor’s text is beautifully profound in Seek What You Want To Find; the music visceral; the title refers to interpretation of events: “even in death, in disorder, in a forced passage, Hope is always there.” The solo voices, overlapping as if bursting with anxiety, are provided by Cecille Elliott, Madeline Ross, John F. Cox, and DeReau K. Farrar. String dissonances mirror the pain (the very first indication in the score is Dark, cold). A version (with piano reduction of the string quartet) can be found in a free PDF download at the composer’s website.

The arrival of the Agnus Dei from Geter’s African American Requiem is perfectly placed: it seems to command us into a space where “Dona eis Requiem” is both necessity and soul-felt demand. It also offers Resonance Ensemble an opportunity to show off the richness of its choral sound, so perfectly blended and yet with every detail audible. And what an affecting harmonic twist Geter brings to “qui tollis peccata mundi.” The jazzier follow-on is unexpected but all the more welcome because of that, stratospheric sopranos flying over the hocketing lower voices. It is of course important to note that here, as on the first disc, the composer conducts his own works.

The concerns of Vin Shambry’s poem RE-FLEC are vital, of how racism is addressed (and vital not just to the USA), and there is no doubting the red-hot intensity of Judy A. Rose’s dramatic setting. The musical vocabulary is vast, and yet perfectly integrated and balanced. Finally, we have Kenji Bunch’s setting of A. Mimi Sei, Shout Out. The confluence of these two people was perfectly timed: Bunch was experiencing burnout, and Sei’s poem lifted him. Scored for choir and solo cello (Valdine Mishkin), it closes Safe Harbor. The cello is a melancholy soliloquizer, the choir at once illustrating and celebrating a shift from the individual to the power of the collective.

If ever there was a release that was greater than the sum of its parts, it is this one. This is a release that offers both the pinnacle of choral singing, and a message of real importance. Booklet notes are to be found online, but the physical product is beautifully designed, and hearing this through speakers as opposed to streaming adds much to the music’s impact. Recommended. Colin Clarke

This article originally appeared in Issue 50:1 (Sept/Oct 2026) of Fanfare Magazine.

On June 2, 2019 a young Black man named Miles Hall with a history of mental issues was shot and killed by police officers in his parents’ home in Walnut Creek, California. I only knew this because my husband, Charles Nelson, was Miles Hall’s uncle and my mother-in-law Edi was the person who called the police, expecting they would help him. Instead they shot him dead. Before that I was intellectually and ideologically a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement. After that, it was something that had touched my family, and therefore me, personally.

I tell this story at the beginning of my review of the Resonance Ensemble’s stunning new two-CD set Safe Harbor because the music and (especially) the texts of the 12 works on this album directly relate to it. The first time I played the album with the texts in hand, I literally started crying as the memories of Miles Hall’s death—including Charles’s reaction to it (he called me and asked me to meet him at the bus stop he got off at on his way home from work so he could unburden himself of his trauma)—started flooding back to me.

The Resonance Ensemble is based in Portland, Oregon (though there are others in New York, Nebraska, and Christchurch, New Zealand) and is about to present its 18th season. According to their website, “Through thoughtful, thematic concerts, Resonance amplifies voices historically excluded from the stage—highlighting underrepresented composers, poets, visual artists, and community collaborators.” Their artistic director, Katherine FitzGibbon, has created a remarkably flexible vocal group that can perform in virtually any style, from the white British glee club tradition to just about all African-American music and, in the title work on this album, Asian traditions in general and Korean in particular.

Their home city, Portland, was the site of the longest demonstrations in the U.S. against the murder of African American George Floyd (1973–2020) by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Nowhere else in the country, not even in Minneapolis, did the protests against the Floyd murder last as long as they did in Portland. And nowhere else did they generate so much violence, largely at the instigation of counter-protesters who attempted to disrupt the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and frequently aligned themselves with President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.

Many of the works on Safe Harbor were commissioned by Resonance Ensemble for Portland Protests, a 2023 concert they gave to honor the Portland demonstrators and their overall commitment to justice and peace. One of the works, “From The Book of Sankofa, Part 1: Words She Would Have Us Know,” is based on sankofa, a word from Twi, the language of the Akan tribe in Ghana (the country, along with the adjacent Gold Coast, that was the source for more African-American slaves than any other site in Africa) that literally means, “Go back and get it.” Composed by Black pianist and composer Darrell Grant to a text by A. Mimi Sei, this piece relates to the way slaves used the word sankofa to maintain connection with their African heritage and culture even while their white owners tried to break them and “season” them to accept permanent servitude.

Grant’s eclectic list of influences on this work includes Thomas Tallis, The Staple Singers, Herbie Hancock, modern classical composer Caroline Shaw, Schubert, Bobby McFerrin, and Ravel, “among others.” Grant says he hopes the work “provides listeners an opportunity to reflect on the questions of what we will pass on, what we must sacrifice, and what must we always remember in order to realize the dreams we hold for ourselves, our children, and our communities.”

Another major compositional talent showcased here is Damien Geter, who’s featured in two excerpts from his An African American Requiem as well as two stand-alone works. The African American Requiem excerpts include his arrangement of the traditional spiritual “There’s a Man Goin’ Round Takin’ Names,” which he used to open the “Liber scriptus” movement, and a setting of the familiar Latin Agnus Dei text. While my favorite version of “Takin’ Names” remains the one I learned it from—the remarkably dramatic solo record by bass-baritone Paul Robeson and pianist Alan Booth—Geter’s setting is an effective showcasing of the multiple meanings of “The Man” as a symbol of white oppression.

Geter’s portrayal of how African Americans continually live under the shadow of white domination becomes more explicit in The Talk: Instructions for Black Children When They Interact with the Police. As a white boy growing up in suburban Marin County, California, I didn’t have to learn to be afraid of the police. I was trained to regard them as helpful older men. Black boys and girls aren’t so lucky; their parents have to train them to treat the police as potential oppressors and even potential murderers. Geter’s text for The Talk runs, “Pull over. Don’t run. Keep calm. Keep your hands where they can see them. Be polite. Save your rage. Get home safely.” (He attributes the phrase “Save your rage” to another African-American poet, Jasmine Love.)

There’s a remarkable passage three minutes into this 7:02 piece that consciously or unconsciously quotes Mary Lou Williams’s Black Christ of the Andes, her 1964 tone poem for chorus, piano, bass, and drums honoring St. Martin de Porres, a mixed-race Peruvian who’s generally considered the Roman Catholic Church’s first Black saint. Whether Geter intended the reference or not, the description of St. Martin de Porres on his Wikipedia page— “Martin’s defiant attachment to the ideal of social justice achieved deep resonance in a church attempting to carry forward that ideal in today’s modern world”—fits right in to this album’s overall themes.

The final work by Geter here is After Time Has Gnawed Away the Shield of Dreams, a setting of a poem by the late African-American conductor James DePreist. It was commissioned by the Resonance Ensemble for a 2020–2021 project called Under the Overpass, in which the choir attempted to continue during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns by staging video-recorded performances under Portland’s many overpasses, taking advantage of the resonances created by the built spaces. This was staged at the iconic Ross Island Bridge and was dedicated to the victims of the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which killed 36 people and destroyed most of the city’s African-American business district.

One of the album’s most fascinating tracks is the title song, Safe Harbor, by Joe Kye, a Korean-American immigrant. Kye’s parents left Korea at age 33 to come to the U.S. in search of better opportunities for Kye and his sister. “America proved to be far harsher than the dreamland we had built in our minds,” Kye wrote. In 2008 Kye’s parents moved back to Korea while leaving him and his sister in the U.S. Kye, who both narrates and plays violin in the piece, draws on traditional Korean folk music as well as America’s own folk styles. “As all the voice parts slowly join in this chorus,” Kye writes, “I hope that we can also join together in building an America that lifts up the voices of those unheard and unsupported, that we may see their suffering as ours—and that, together, we can envision and build a land that is greater than the one we inhabit now.” That sentiment, which ends the first CD of this set, REflect, could sum up Resonance’s agenda for the entire release.

Disc two, REimagine, begins with a setting by Jasmine Barnes of a pre-existing poem written at the height of COVID-19 by Sonya Renee Taylor called “Normal Never Was.” It’s a plea to this country not to go back to the way things were before the pandemic because, as Taylor explains, “Our pre-corona existence was not normal, other than we normalized Greed/Other than we normalized inequity/other than we normalized exhaustion, depletion, extraction/disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate, and lack.” Musically, Normal Never Was, like We Are Murmurs that begins disc one, sounds like the vocal pop-jazz of 1950s groups like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, Jackie & Roy, and The Hi-Los. The sound is trivial but the lyrical message packs a punch.

Two of the tracks on the REimagine side, Mari Esabel Valverde’s We Hold Your Names Sacred (text by Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi) and Judy A. Rose’s RE-FLEC (text by Vin Shambry), literally contain lists of names. RE-FLEC is a tribute to Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed by police officers in Louisville, Kentucky; the officers stormed into her home under a so-called “no-knock” search warrant, a practice of dubious constitutionality stemming from the so-called “War on Drugs.”

Taylor’s case didn’t achieve the nationwide notoriety of George Floyd’s because it wasn’t video-recorded. “Breonna’s murder was overlooked as it wasn’t ‘witnessed’ by the world on video,” Rose explained in her notes. Shambry’s text also mentions other names of African-American victims of police or white racist violence, including the notorious Emmett Till case from 1955. Till was a 14-year-old boy lynched by a white mob in Drew, Mississippi, and his mother insisted that his casket be kept open during the funeral so the world could see what the racist mob had done to him. “My sense of loss stems from knowing any moment I could be killed,” Shambry says.

We Hold Your Names Sacred is a tribute to Black and Brown Transwomen who have become victims of hate-based violence. One of America’s (and the world’s) dirty little (or not-so-little) secrets is the extent to which Trans people have become favorite targets of prejudice-driven violence. Occasionally anti-Trans violence makes the news or popular media, as did the killings of Brandon Teena in 1993 and Gwen (née Eddie) Araujo in 2002. (Teena’s case became the subject of an Academy Award-winning movie, Boys Don’t Cry, in 1999, with Hilary Swank playing them.) Most often, though, Trans victims of violence and murder go unrecorded and unrecognized.

Kimberly Osberg’s Seek What You Want to Find, based on a text by Dr. S. Renee Mitchell, was inspired by an exhibit that featured four previously unshown works by a Dutch-American artist, Henk Pender. Pender had lived in The Netherlands during the Nazi occupation in World War II, and after watching the Portland protests against George Floyd’s murder and the counter-demonstrations by white Trump supporters, Pender flashed back to his childhood under the Nazis and said, “This is what fascism looks like.” Resonance’s Portland Protests program in March 2023 was inspired by Pender’s paintings as well as his observations and the photography of the protests by Tojo Andrianarivo, and Seek What You Want to Find closed that program.

After a lot of surprisingly intense works, the album closes with Shout Out!, composed by Kenji Bunch to a text by A. Mimi Sei. It is a piece solidly in the British glee club tradition and it ends with the words, “Sing out, shout out in wondrous harmony/Our spirits unchanged/Our lips hoping for victory/Fueled by hope and unfurling dreams/Comfort and love and sweet memories.”

It’s hard to make a definitive recommendation for this album because how you feel about the music and (especially) the lyrics will depend a lot on your personal politics. If you’re a Trump supporter who applauds his cold-hearted attempts to annihilate all the political, social, and spiritual equality we’ve progressed to over the last 75 years, you’ll probably write off this album as anti-American propaganda. If you believe that the task of world leaders is to bring people together, if you reject the politics of division and white supremacy that have fueled Trump’s movement, and if you long for a future in which racism, sexism, homophobia, and Transphobia have been relegated to the ash heap and all people have equal opportunities to achieve as much as their talents allow, this release is not only recommended but essential. Mark Gabrish Conlan