The Journey by David Conte 4-Part - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: MQ.5969-E

The Journey is a twenty-minute cantata extracted from the opera The Dreamers. The opera was commissioned and produced by the Sonoma City Opera in 1996; Antoinette Kuhry, producer; musical direction by John Miner; stage direction by Sanrda Bernhard. The Dreamers captures a formative moment in American history where characters are separated by their cultural and racial differences, and brought together by their dreams and their longing for a new home. The Journey was commissioned by the Oakland East Bay Symphony, Michael Morgan, conductor, and was premiered at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, CA on May 18th, 2001.

To set the scene for the excerpt here entitled The Journey: The entire town of Sonoma is gathered at The Collonade Theater to watch an amateur production of Shakespeare's Othello. An unpleasant racial incident occurs which brings the performance to a halt. To smooth thingsover, a sing-a-long is proposed. The song chosen is "My Old Kentucky Home" by Stephen Foster. After a brief statement of that tune in the orchestra, the entire company enters a dream-state, as six characters from the opera, with commentary by the chorus, sing arias about "home." Johnny Rowe, an American soldier stationed in Sonoma, serves as a kind of master-of-ceremonies. Black Sam is a freed slave working as a gambler in Sonoma to earn money to buy his wife out of slavery. Indian Princess Isadora is the last of her tribe. Jim and Mary Eastin have migrated to California from Kentucky. Lizzy Fine is a widow who sings a farewell to her departed husband. The finale of this sequence is an Octet, where all six characters and the men and women of the chorus sing their various texts together, ending with the words from Stephen Foster: "Weep no more."