Concordia, NDSU composers bring together electronics, piano, and American poet Carl Sandburg

While Concordia College’s Dr. Doug Harbin has created music from the sounds of butterfly wingbeats and buzzing bees, this time his collaborators are a deceased Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, a composer-in-residence at North Dakota State University, a voice instructor, and a dedicated pianist.

“As far as we are aware, this is the first compositional collaboration between the composers-in-residence at Concordia (Doug Harbin) and NDSU (Dr. Kyle Vanderburg),” said Dr. Mara Campbell, the Concordia voice instructor bringing her soprano vocals to the collaboration.

The piece, composed for voice, piano, and electronics, will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 25, in the Hvidsten Hall of Music’s Christiansen Recital Hall. Cobber alumna Jo Marie Fike will play the piano.

The recital will also mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, as the group chose as their text the poetry of American poet Carl Sandburg.

Sandburg, who died in 1967, was famous during his lifetime for his biography of Abraham Lincoln as well as his poetry, but now may be more familiar as the writer of “Fog,” with its memorable first lines: “The fog comes/on little cat feet.” Much of his work focuses on America, from its industry and drive to progress to the morally ambiguous effects of its ambition.

“As we continued to work on the project, we found that the themes of the poems we selected resonate with the intersection of humanity and technology that dominates our current cultural conversations,” Campbell said.

The piece has an unusual structure, offering listeners the chance to hear two composers interpret the same text in the same work. Six of Sandburg’s poems were selected; Harbin has composed an opening prelude and then set the poems in a specific order for the first part of the performance. The middle section will be a joint composition between Harbin and Vanderburg. The third section will be Vanderburg’s setting of the same poems, in reverse order, and a postlude.

The Sandburg poems featured are “Grass,” “Prayers of Steel,” “Hats,” “Under a Telephone Wire,” “Manual System,” and “Smoke.”

The piece will premiere at NDSU on Sept. 24 and Concordia on Sept. 25, along with “Hallucinations,” a piece Vanderburg wrote for Campbell that’s based on text hallucinated by AI. The show will also include Harbin’s “The Reddit Relationship Cycle,” with a guest appearance by tenor Cody Pepitone.

“I’m very excited for this recital, especially the new collaborative song cycle! Despite being in the public domain (and being circa 100 years old), the Sandburg poems we chose feel remarkably relevant today as they explore themes of nature and humanity’s relationship with technology,” Harbin said. “Given these topics, it feels especially fitting that the song cycle will feature not only the voice and an acoustic instrument like the piano, but also integrate electronic sounds.

“My portion of the cycle will ask the pianist to place metal objects inside the piano, transforming its sound into something entirely different.”

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