Pacific Beach

9 min.

March 1, 2013
David Brower Center, Berkeley, CA
Volti, conducted by Robert Geary

Commissioned by Volti

Texts by Kenneth Rexroth

These are poems about loneliness and the loss of innocence about love. Both are drawn from the sequence Air and Angels that concludes Kenneth Rexroth’s 1963 collection Natural Numbers. The “I” in At Least That Abandon appears at the still point, watching everything about him whirl and thrum, and returns in Pacific Beach racing through the stillness. For part of the sequence Rexroth is in dialogue with poets from different eras: Pacific Beach at various points recalls Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, and the title of the sequence itself is taken from John Donne. The San Francisco Bay Area chamber choir, Volti, directed by Robert Geary, commissioned Pacific Beach and premiered the work in March 2013 at the David Brower Center in Berkeley and then performed it the following day in San Francisco. The following season, The Crossing, directed by Donald Nally, gave the East Coast premiere, during its Month of Moderns series, at Chestnut Hill Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania.

• March 1, 2013: Volti conducted by Robert Geary, David Brower Center, Berkeley, California
• March 2, 2013: Volti conducted by Robert Geary, St. Mark’s, San Francisco
• March 3, 2013: Volti conducted by Robert Geary, David Brower Center, Berkeley, California
• June 15, 2014: The Crossing conducted by Donald Nally, Month of Moderns Festival, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia