Unlike a question posed on a history exam, this one is explored here in the recital hall through the lens of song, because its answers are nuanced, complicated, and deeply human. There is no single response that falls neatly along a binary; as with most of human history, the truth resists simplicity. Precisely because of the freedoms of speech our founders envisioned, our nation is able to be both things at once.

In a time when audiences are increasingly less familiar with the art of the vocal recital, this program underscores why the form remains so vital—especially in our polarized moment. With its potent fusion of words and music, song holds a unique power: it allows us to inhabit contradiction and complexity. Within its frame, we can hold the truths of both visions of our national identity at once. Rather than fall into the divisive traps of binary debate that dominate today’s media ecosystem, song invites us to listen beyond argument. It empowers us to center the human experiences caught between these opposing views of American identity and to hear the fragile, resilient voices at the heart of our shared history.

Tonight’s program delves into its central question by posing a constellation of related ones that surround it: What does it mean to leave one’s home for another? What is the experience of such a journey? What is it to feel like a stranger in one’s own home? What do we bring when uprooting a whole life to begin anew? What does it feel like to be turned away when seeking refuge? What happens when the journey ends—how are we received in the place we arrive?

This evening, each set of songs is grouped by one of these inquiries. Two sections titled Journey feature songs by British-American composer Rebecca Clarke and British composer Errollyn Wallen CBE, alongside works by Franz Schubert and Ralph Vaughan Williams that explore the act of traveling from one place to another. The Songs We Carried brings together folk-song arrangements by Béla Bartók and Antonín Dvořák—both of whom spent extended periods in America—alongside an arrangement of the folk and gospel tune Poor Wayfaring Stranger by Ohio-born composer Steven Mark Kohn. The Welcome pairs Ruth Crawford Seeger’s striking setting of Chinese-American poet and actor Hsi Tseng Tsiang’s Chinaman, Laundryman with Schubert’s expansive setting of Franz von Schober’s poem romanticizing the figure of the homeless wanderer as a kind of eternal pilgrim. Refugee Blues features Mohammed Fairouz’s setting of W. H. Auden’s poem recounting the plight of Jewish refugees during World War II, who found themselves denied entry at nearly every port as they sought to escape the Holocaust. Strangers presents Jake Heggie’s song cycle These Strangers, which sets texts by Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Martin Niemöller, and Walt Whitman—each meditating on what it means to be a stranger in what should not be such a strange land.

Our program’s title comes from a song on the second half by Chicago-based composer Eric Malmquist: an eloquent setting of Carl Sandburg’s poem Fellow Citizens. In it, Sandburg recounts a day spent interviewing Chicago’s “upstanding citizens”—a millionaire manufacturer, a newspaper magnate, the mayor—before ending his day near Hull House, the settlement founded by Jane Addams to serve the city’s growing immigrant population during the Gilded Age. While each of his earlier subjects claims a kind of worldly success, it is the impoverished Italian immigrant guitar-maker he meets near Hull House who seems to have found peace. Sandburg paints a portrait of quiet nobility, concluding that this man—alone among those he met that day—was the only Chicagoan he envied.

The program is bookended by works of composers who migrated during their lifetimes. In the closing set of songs, Robert Owens and Florence Price each followed the path of America’s Great Migration in the twentieth century: Price moving north from Arkansas to Chicago, Owens from Texas to California. After serving in the U.S. military during World War II, Owens migrated once again—this time to Germany, where he spent much of his career. The Second World War also prompted Rebecca Clarke’s relocation to the United States, where she remained after being unable to obtain a wartime visa to return to Britain.

At the other end of the evening, the program opens with Irving Berlin’s musical thank-you note to the country that welcomed him as a child fleeing Russian pogroms. Berlin described the song not as patriotic, but as “an expression of gratitude for what this country has done for its citizens—of what home really means.”