“Earth Symphony,” my first choral symphony and 9th collaboration with poet Todd Boss, is complete! The world premiere will be February 25, 2022 with True Concord Voices and Orchestra.
“Earth Symphony,” the ground-breaking choral symphony from GRAMMY-nominated composer Jake Runestad and poet Todd Boss, is a 5-part dramatic monologue from the voice of a post-anthropocene Mother Earth. The work imagines Earth’s hope for humanity, her discovery of its power, her ruination at its hands, her lament at its loss, and her recovery. By anthropomorphizing Earth herself, drawing on the familiar earth-mother trope, “Earth Symphony” enables entry into our own ecological shame, guilt, responsibility, potential, and redemption, all from a wide-angled, time-telescoped lens, thereby asking our most immediately pressing environmental questions in an entirely new way.