At Home

Writing a piece about home is not a terribly unique venture, but it is one that is so rich and has inspired many poets and composers. This is no surprise, for everyone remembers and celebrates the place where they belong. To me, At Home strays from some of the normal tropes of youth, ancestry, and birth home memories and instead moves toward the home we create as adults. Since the piece was commissioned by Laurie Jacobi for her husband Cotty Lowry’s 70th birthday, the poetry I chose feels very personal, very specific. From the first movement we know the characters: there is a “you” and “I,” the two people occupying this place. But Wendell Berry’s poem doesn’t immediately join these two people together, he instead asserts his own individuality of where he finds himself at home, and it’s alone, out in nature. Yet he still cares for his partner in this poem, wishing for them to stay just as content in their own personal place of belonging.

Cotty Lowry is a realtor, and so Laurie wanted to include moments that described the physicality of houses. The maintenance, the aging, the sense of space. “New Roof” does this so well, combining Berry’s love of nature with the grounding element of his house. The rising arpeggios in the winds are constantly searching upwards, let loose from the confines of the house to reach the boundless. “Good Bones” is a commissioned poem from longtime collaborator Julia Klatt Singer, whose language and imagery matches Berry’s so well. This ode to an aging house is a delightful metaphor for our own bodies: how they age and how they are loaded up with wisdom, experience and memories. Her flirtatious way of recalling the couple’s history is mirrored in the clarinet writing and the harmonies from the choir. (See if you can spot the musical quote, played by the piano in the hallway.)

“A Place” is full of movement, with the choir singing in a round, and the woodwinds moving from the front of the hall to the back. It’s here that Berry tells us that the journey we’ve been on our whole life has not been a journey at all, but the place we’ve been seeking. So we find our couple finally at home, “Together on the Porch.” After embracing their individuality in the opening movement, they now occupy the same space, in a quiet routine of love and of life. They know they are loved, but they choose to say the words out loud anyway. And not knowing which will be the first to go back into the house is the same as not knowing who will outlive the other. There is no fear, but they find comfort and fulfillment instead in the present time and present place. Not the journey, the place. At home.

– Timothy C. Takach, 2019

Program Notes, by Joshua Shank:

At Home is a 2019 work by Minnesota-based composer Timothy Takach which draws on four texts by famed Kentucky poet Wendell Berry, supplemented by another from fellow Minnesotan Julia Klatt Singer. It was commissioned by a woman to celebrate the 70th birthday of her husband, an affable local realtor in the Twin Cities.

Inspired by his profession, At Home celebrates the dwellings we endeavor to make our own in order to shape a life within them. Across five movements, the work explores the physical and emotional life of a home, tracing a journey from individuality to companionship, and showing how these places are built not just from walls and roofs, but from care, attention, and the shared rhythms of life together.

The first two movements are brief. “I am at Home” features a near-constant accompaniment of flute and clarinet, a conspicuous duo perhaps inspired by the husband and wife behind the creation of the work. Then, in “New Roof,” Berry adds a piece of himself to his home through the unglamorous—but in his hands deeply meaningful—work of replacing a roof. Throughout, Takach has the choir simply deliver the text, as if they’re reading it to the listener. The music is unpretentious and quietly reflective, mirroring the simplicity and honesty of the great American poet who wrote the words.

“Good Bones” borrows a real-estate phrase: A house may age, but if it has “good bones,” it’s still got charm. The poem extends this notion to life and love, celebrating the quiet familiarity of a couple growing old together. Takach sets the words with cheeky swung rhythms and warm choral harmonies, capturing the poem’s humor and affection, showing how a home and a partnership carry the marks—and joys—of a life well lived. Then, in “A Place,” Takach sets the text in a flowing round, with Copland-esque harmonies suggesting open skies leading to a quiet arrival. The choir weaves overlapping lines while woodwinds move through the hall, celebrating another aspect of “home:” coming back to it.

At Home is brought to a gentle close in “Together on the Porch,” which finds a couple at home in a quiet routine and shared understanding (which eventually serves as a subtle metaphor for something else). The full choir sings, but on the page, the music is written in only two parts throughout: a nod to the two subjects in Berry’s tender poem. Takach departs from this voicing only once—on the word “goodnight”—and in the final measures, the sun sets on the home and the lone partner who remains.