Our winter program features the world premiere performances of a new extended choral work by Nicholas Cline, based on Rachel Jamison Webster’s The Sea Came Up and Drowned, a collection of erasure poems based on John McPhee’s book Annals of the Former World in which Webster explores the issues of land ownership and resource extraction using abstract language and visual collage artwork. Complementing the commission is another important environmental work. Gabriel Jackson’s Rigwreck, written in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, sets a poem by Pierre Joris about humanity’s relationship with technology, the earth, and with one another.