What is Home? (2026)
For piccolo, bass clarinet, violin, violoncello, piano, percussion
Commissioned by Eighth Blackbird, Collage New Music (with support of the Frank B. Epstein Commissioning Fund), Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and Korean Cultural Society of Boston
Duration: 8 minutes
Watch
Collage New Music: Sarah Brady, piccolo | Alexis Lanz, bass clarinet Catherine French, violin | Jan Müller-Szeraws, cello Christopher Oldfather, piano | Craig McNutt, percussion | Eric Nathan, conductor
Listen
Collage New Music: Sarah Brady, piccolo | Alexis Lanz, bass clarinet Catherine French, violin | Jan Müller-Szeraws, cello Christopher Oldfather, piano | Craig McNutt, percussion | Eric Nathan, conductor
Program Note
Soon after I was appointed Artistic Director of Collage New Music in Boston, I envisioned a commissioning project that would speak to what “home” means to us in the United States today. I approached Chicago’s Eighth Blackbird and San Francisco’s Left Coast Chamber Ensemble to co-commission with Collage a suite of six new works, What is Home?, inviting six composers from across America—JaRon Brown, Erin Gee, April Dawn Guthrie, Angélica Negrón, Juri Seo and myself—to each respond to the question, What does home mean to you?
As I began to respond musically to this prompt, I soon found how complex and multifaceted the notion of home is for me. The musical response I have created is searching and questioning, in a cyclic structure that is ultimately itself both answering and questioning, simultaneously rhetorically and earnestly: What is Home?
While I have lived in numerous places, I have felt the strongest sense of home in three locations: Larchmont, NY (my hometown), Providence, RI (my current home), and Rome, Italy (my home for a year coming-of-age, and which I return to often). Uniting my experiences in these cities in unexpected ways are the sounds of bells.
Below, I present various points of inspiration, unconnected. My work aims to piece these together for myself.
A faintly misremembered quotation of the melody of the Sunday morning bells sounding from the church across the street from my childhood home. I have my warmest memories of “home” waking to the bells with sunlight streaming in through my window.
Experiencing from my Providence home the horror of the unfolding Brown University school shooting on December 13, 2025, which took place two miles down my street at the school where I teach.
Reading playwright Sarah Ruhl’s editorial in the Guardian, “My daughter was in the Brown University library, hiding under the desk” (December 23, 2025). Ruhl is a Brown University alum and parent of a current Brown student. These lines of her poem haunted me:
“Sound the quiet bell
Melt all the guns into bells –
we’d have such songs of peace”
Standing on the Roman Janiculum, the highest hill in Rome, experiencing a cannon firing its weekly signal at noon, setting off a clamorous choir of all the church bells resounding across the city below. It is a mysteriously joyous din hearing each bell swinging at its own rate and patterns, like a city full of tolling clocks, announcing time.
Reading the New York Times article, “The Nazi Plunder of Church Bells Changed the Sound of Europe” (December 27, 2025), which describes how the Nazis removed 150,000 bells from churches across Europe, silencing the acoustic landscapes in many towns during the war and removing the time-keeping apparatus many relied on in daily life. Many of these bells were melted for metals to create weapons.
A quotation of the song, America (My Country, ‘Tis of Thee), a melody that I performed often in my youth and have re-fashioned in my music in two previous works, in different contexts.
The “lament bass,” a descending four-chord harmonic progression found in musical lamentations from the Renaissance to the present.
What is Home? was Commissioned by Collage New Music with the support of the Frank B. Epstein Commissioning Fund and Korean Cultural Society of Boston; commissioned by Eighth Blackbird; commissioned by Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. It was composed in Larchmont, Providence and at Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide, Italy in December 2025 and January 2026. It is dedicated to my parents, Amy and Carl Nathan, and my wife, Luyuan.