Contested Eden

Fire has a way of reshaping everything: the land, the air, even the way we see the world around us. For composer Gabriela Lena Frank, witnessing years of devastating wildfires in her home state of California made it impossible to look away. Her piece Contested Eden grew from that reckoning – a work born of grief, perseverance, and ultimately, hope – and a reminder that even amid loss, there is still something worth protecting.

That same spirit of reflection and resilience threads through this broadcast, as composers past and present consider our changing world and the conviction to care for it. The program opens with the celebratory harvest dances of Vivaldi’s Autumn from The Four Seasons, followed by Alan Hovhaness’s Spirit of Trees, a sonata for harp and guitar that merges classical structure with Eastern-inspired lyricism to honor the sacredness of nature.

At the heart of the hour is Gabriela Lena Frank’s Contested Eden, performed by the ASU Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Jeffrey Meyer: a work that moves from intimate atmospheric music for California to an elegy for a landscape transformed by fire. This broadcast also features Christopher Tin’s Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, setting Emily Dickinson’s poem to radiant choral textures, and Glenn Stallcop’s Episodes, a four-movement portrait of conviction and human resolve, written for Urban Nocturnes.

Together, these performances trace a path from nature’s beauty to our responsibility to it – music that listens closely to the world around us, and asks what it means to care for the earth, for one another, and for the future we share.