Victims and survivors of war and natural disasters are receiving the recognition due Sunday with the premiere of “Worldwide Requiem” at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Composed and conducted by Brigham Young University Hawaii faculty member Erica Glenn, “Worldwide Requiem” is being performed by the BYU-Hawaii Ho‘olokahi Chamber Choir and almost 50 additional voices as part of this year’s New England Symphonic Ensemble program presented by MidAmerica Production.
Glenn’s 25-minute, seven-movement work honors lives lost violently in Japan, the Palestinian territories, the Philippines, Tonga, Ukraine and Hawaii, with choral performances in languages representative of each area. The final movement, sung in Hawaiian and enhanced visually with hula, recalls the fiery destruction of Lahaina in 2023 and offers a vision of beauty rising from the ashes.
Glenn started work on “Worldwide Requiem” after she was invited to participate in the annual MidAmerica Production program several years ago.
“I thought how amazing it would be to bring something that uniquely represents the group performing,” she said recently. “At the university we have students from over 60 countries around the world. In my choir alone they speak over 20 languages. And I thought there needs to be some sort of composition that honors the resilience of these amazing people from so many different areas of the world, especially in areas of the world that have really only registered as kind of a blip on the Western world’s radar.”
Several of Glenn’s choral students are survivors of natural or man-made disasters. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, she experienced some of their pain.
“I lived in Ukraine for a year and a half in the very areas that were hit hardest by the war. Some of the people I love most in the world live, or lived, in places like Donetsk and Mariupol and Kharkov. And my sweet students were right with me through all of that, supporting me, and we put together a benefit concert for Ukraine.”
Glenn’s students were also with her when she got the idea of creating a multilingual requiem.
“I took the traditional (Latin) text that’s often used for requiems, and then my students, who are from those regions of the world, assisted me in translating them into the appropriate languages, and we were very specific. For example, the third movement is dedicated to the Tacloban disaster in the Philippines, and we translated it not into Tagalog, but into Waray, which is the language spoken in that area. I actually have a student who survived that event. For Palestine we have Levantine Arabic.”
With other movements performed in Japanese, Tongan and Ukrainian, and passages within the movements performed in English and in the traditional Latin, “Worldwide Requiem” shares its message in a total of eight languages.
“I wanted to honor those areas of the world and then also present a message of hope,” Glenn said. “This is not just dedicated to one area of the world; it’s truly a worldwide requiem and representative of people from many different cultures and places coming together and mourning together and experiencing shared humanity, and then healing each other’s wounds in the process of doing that.”
Glenn hopes it will be possible to stage a hana hou production of “Worldwide Requiem” in Hawaii.
