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In 2022, Catalyst New Music put together teams of poets/lyricists, composers, and singers to create new art song in its FUSE project. I was matched with singer Daniel Laverriere and composer Keane Southard because we shared an interest in the environment and climate change. After talking with Daniel and Keane, I did research on several topics and settled on deforestation after reading several historic and recent accounts of logging in North America. The result is Felling, a three-song cycle. The first song in the cycle, “In the Camp of Jacques Freneau,” is based on an account written by Clifton White in 1902, when he visited several lumber camps and wrote about the dangerous work undertaken there, the rough conditions in which the loggers lived, and how the forests were seen as an unending resource for people to take and use. Song II, “Haiku for Deforestation,” distills a belief that the forest is home to the unseen, the ineffable, and that when the woods are cut down, that invisible quality is destroyed as well. The final line speaks to my belief that we need action and physical change, not prayers (in either sense of the word), in order to address environmental crises and climate change. Priscilla and Michael Hunter, after whom the third song in the cycle, “Priscilla’s Backyard” is written, are members of the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians in California, where they are activists against commercial logging on tribal lands. They speak eloquently and compellingly about the need to protect the ancient redwood forests there and how important the forests are for everyone in the area. “Priscilla’s Backyard,” nods to their work and the long connections between the tribe and the forest.

Kendra Preston Leonard

2023

Felling was composed in late November 2022 and completed in early January 2023 in collaboration with poet Kendra Preston Leonard and baritone Daniel Laverriere as part of FUSE: Collaborations in Song organized by Catalyst New Music and the Boston Singers’ Resource.

Keane Southard

2023

Premiered February 11, 2023 by Daniel Laverrier-baritone, and Brendon Shapiro-piano, at the Longy School of Music, Cambridge, MA.

Text

I.   The Camp of Jacques Freneau

after Clifton White, 1902

Fifty choppers in the heart of the woods,

felling the pine and the spruce;

the wilderness there is shorn to brush,

inviting fire and flood.

Men on the snow, eight feet deep,

chopping now two to a tree;

they shout and it falls,

defeated and down

and the ice falls up to a cloud.

The oxen and drays

pull the sled to the train

where the scaler figures and marks;

he is the funeral eulogist

for each of these vanquished firs.

“What wealth,” he says, “we find in these logs.

Lumber for homes, for raising a barn.

And there’s beauty there too: 

fine planks for a table.

We’ll take every tree this forest will give us.”

In these great white woods,

men stampede with saws,

stripping the landscape so bare

—so bare—

that the woodpeckers all have gone.

II.  Haiku for Deforestation

When the trees are gone,

so will the spirits go too.

No prayers will help.

III. Priscilla’s Backyard

after Priscilla Hunter and Michael Hunter, 2022

The ancestors are become earth,

and the beargrass rises,

a flower-city in the air.

Leave the redwood

uncut,

and leave it all be;

where the old village lies,

let the hearths be graced with

carex and ferns.

-Kendra Preston Leonard