Premiered by the Cincinnati Song Initiative by Shannon Cochran, soprano and Christine Lalog, piano

Lyrics by the composer:

I am a drop in a concrete sea

Not a sea of tranquility,

But the torrent of life, with its countless terrors

Beating me battered, leaving me lost in the errors

Of my ways

Oh, won’t you hold me through the storm?

Won’t somebody come keep me warm?

Make me forget all that I have been cut off from

I have long forgotten that I could have more.

We all become numb

By a sum

By a total of disparate despairs

Collecting inside the heart

Coronary coffers bursting from the weight

Of all the little losses

What if we turned to each other?

What if we stopped this morbid crawl?

Though we so love our lives, we’re losing them

What if we shared them, what if we could have it all?

Let’s hold each other through the storm

A tender heart is what will keep us warm,

Never forget, we must never be cut off from

The light inside that tells us all that we were meant

For more.

Concrete Sea is about many things: chiefly, the isolation of urban life—the atomized existence it forces upon us all, the sorrows of young millennial adulthood, and the possibility of hope through an increasingly elusive source: true community. On a personal level, this piece was also a chance to reflect on the years I spent in New York. I got my master’s degree at The New School and then spent another year out there doing remote work and freelancing as a singer. During that last year I felt incredibly lonely—I had a partner who was often out of town for business, and it seemed like my friends could hardly give me the time of day. I had three jobs and spent nearly all my time indoors working from home and going to rehearsals and gigs. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I was forced to move back to my family home in the Bay Area, and my isolation merely continued. This time has made it abundantly clear that I am, as we all are, hopelessly dependent on a community of friends and family. It is only through other people that we can face the horrors of life and become greater than ourselves.

I wrote this piece while reading M. Scott Peck’s The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace and was awestruck by the book’s brand of pragmatic optimism, and the concrete ways in which the author proposes community should be built. While Peck was writing during the latter days of the Cold War, the overwhelming sense of danger and division that threatened our way of life back then has arguably only increased. Our problems are increasingly global, and the pandemic has laid bare all the ways in which we are endlessly interconnected as living beings. It is up to us to reach out to each other, to embrace our connectedness, and to build new systems on the ashes of those which are crumbling before our very eyes.