Jocelyn will be featured this summer as the Santa Fe Desert Chorale’s Composer-in-Residence. She composed a work titled “Caminante,” for SATB double choir, and the piece will be premiered during the Mystics and Mavericks concerts. The program celebrates female sages and innovators both ancient and modern.
More information can be found in my events calendar.
One request from the conductor, Joshua Habermann, was for the piece to tie into the community of Santa Fe with a bilingual text, sung in both English and Spanish. Joshua shared this beautiful poem with her, and it became the basis for the work.
“Caminante, son tus huellas Traveler, your footprints
el camino y nada más; are the only road, nothing else.
Caminante, no hay camino, Traveler, there is no road;
se hace camino al andar. you make your own path as you walk.
Al andar se hace el camino, As you walk, you make your own road,
y al volver la vista atrás and when you look back
se ve la senda que nunca you see the path
se ha de volver a pisar. you will never travel again.
Caminante, no hay camino Traveler, there is no road;
sino estelas en la mar.” only a ship’s wake on the sea.
~ Antonio Machado (1912)
To complement this wonderful poem, Jocelyn commissioned frequent collaborator, poet Julia Klatt Singer. Here is her response poem, titled “Traveler.”
Traveler
You watch the water swell and spill,
measure change in the distant blue.
Seeing isn’t believing, but being
carried to shore, in the boat
of your own body. Even if
your footprints wash away
even as rocks are turned to sand
you are shaped by the world.
Carry the wind and the seas
and the mountains and the trees
in each breath, and love
and memory.
~ Julia Klatt Singer (2021)
Jocelyn married the two pieces together, as distinct songs that pair together as a partner song. Listeners hear the Machado song first, then the Singer poem, and then both songs together.
