“Your Name” is a meditation on the loss of a loved one who is forgotten momentarily, but whose memory returns in a vision of the sky and the prairie. In her poem, Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota’s Poet Laureate, proclaims that the dead can communicate from "beyond the grave” through the images, sounds, and even silence, that permeate the landscape. The harmony is imbued with gentle, diffused dissonances that impart the poem’s tension between physical absence and the enduring quality of love.

One day, when you were no longer
there, I forgot to say your name.
I say it now. Your name

 is more beautiful than the sky
at dawn—the bowl of it fills up 
with colors only air can hold.

 I hear your name on the prairie,
coming from beyond the farthest
field, the last line of trees—your name

is the only thing that can prove
that the ear can hear beyond the grave.
I say your name, and you answer

 with a silence that I take
for love—a love that I carry
all the way to the horizon.

-Joyce Sutphen
used with permission by the author 

Your Name was composed and premiered as part of the 2021 Source Song Festival. It was written for and premiered by Valeria Bibliowicz, mezzo-soprano and Felipe Calle, pianist, and distributed via online broadcast on August 4, 2021.

Ryan Homsey is a versatile American composer, equally at home writing for chamber and choral ensembles, theater, and dance. His music has been performed in the US, Italy, Portugal, France, and the Philippines across a wide range of new music venues from concert halls, churches, and theaters to warehouses, clubs, and galleries.

Ryan’s compositions juxtapose tradition and innovation. His training in classical and popular music draws additional inspiration from his past experience as a professional ballet dancer.

His works have been performed by JACK Quartet, PUBLIQuartet, Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra’s Music to You String Quartet, Quiet City, Ensemble Mise-en, Boston New Music Initiative, violinist Adrianna Mateo, and baritone Kelvin Chan, among others. Commissions and awards have come from the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS), Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, NY Children’s Aid Chorus, New Haven Oratorio Choir, and Skidmore College’s Dance Department. Recent performance venues include the Taipei Cultural Center in New York City, the Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ryan Homsey’s music has been featured in new music festivals and concerts by Circles and Lines, Music With A View, the Westchester Square Arts Festival, Catholic University of America’s New Voices @ CUA in Washington, D.C., and Ensemble Mise-en’s music festival at the Taipei Cultural Center in New York City. Other recent performance venues include the Purchase College Performing Arts Center, the Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

His work as a composer/sound designer has been heard in theater productions at HERE Arts, Metropolitan Playhouse, Astoria Performing Arts Center, Deconstructive Theatre Project, Emerging Artists Theatre, BoCoCa Arts Festival, and Vaudeville Park. As a recipient of American Composers Forum’s Live Music for Dance grant, Ryan composed a multi-movement work entitled Recurrent Stages for The Minnesota Ballet. The short film documenting this critically acclaimed collaboration was nominated for an Upper Midwest Emmy® Award.

Ryan also enjoyed a seven-year professional dance career in ballet that includes the Minnesota Ballet, American National Ballet, and Lexington Ballet Company. As a singer, musician, and music director, he has participated in numerous musical theater projects, including an International Tour of productions with Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Really Useful Group.

Ryan is Lecturer in the Conservatory of Music at the State University of New York (SUNY) Purchase. Ryan has studied with Justin Dello Joio, Julia Wolfe, Alice Parker, and Allyson Bellink. His music is published by Water Willow Music and GIA Publications. www.ryanhomsey.com

Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm in Stearns County, Minnesota. She is a professor emeritus of English at Gustavus Adolphus College and is Minnesota’s poet laureate.

She is the author of seven poetry collections, including Straight Out of View, Coming Back to the Body, and Naming the Stars, and is a coeditor of To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present.

Joyce Sutphen serves as the first Poet-In-Residence at Source Song Festival for our 2021 Festival.