To An Alaskan Glacier
Op. 27 (2024) - 14½'
for high voice, cello and piano
COMPOSER'S NOTE
In 1899, railroad tycoon E.H. Harriman sponsored the largest scientific expedition to Alaska to date. One hundred and twenty-six scientists and crew set sail from Seattle aboard the SS George W. Elder, a luxuriously refitted 250-foot steamer. Their mission was to explore America's "last frontier" and catalog its flora and fauna.
One of the Elder's most colorful passengers was Charles Augustus Keeler of San Francisco. A lifelong adventurer with a bohemian spirit, Keeler was a quintessential renaissance man: scientist, naturalist, artist and poet. In California, he was an early promoter of the Arts and Crafts Movement in architecture, and he gave Bernard Maybeck, one of the Movement's notable practitioners, his first residential commission. Maybeck would later go on to build San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, centerpiece of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.
A charter member of the Sierra Club, Keeler was also a prominent environmentalist. After the Alaska expedition, he returned home with two new close friends, John Muir and John Burrows, with whom he shared a zeal for nature and its preservation.
To An Alaskan Glacier is Keeler's ode to Alaska's awe-inspiring phenomenon. It opens with an image of the maternal sea and its glacial offspring, buttressed by ice shelves that slow its flow into the ocean. Each line fills one with dread, wonder and affection. The glacier is less lifeless object than living testament to our planet's beauty and power. Keeler included the poem in his Idylls of El Dorado, a collection of poems published one year after the expedition.
This is the first musical setting of To An Alaskan Glacier as far as I'm aware, and I composed it for the 2025 Sitka Summer Music Festival in Sitka, Alaska. Led by my friend, artistic director and Grammy-award winning cellist Zuill Bailey, the Sitka Music Festival presents as many as twenty-four concerts and events each June, assisted by twenty-five business and community partners and nearly one hundred volunteers.
In February 2024, I had the pleasure of joining Zuill and our mutual friend, soprano Danielle Talamantes, as a guest artist for Alaska Airlines' Winter Classics 2024, which the Sitka Music Festival presented. While in Sitka, I discovered Keeler's poem and determined to create a chamber setting that my friends and I could perform together. Arranged for high voice, cello and piano, To An Alaskan Glacier was written with Zuill and Danielle in mind. It is my tribute to Alaska and homage to Keeler.