At This Point

How do you celebrate 400 years of habitation? Settlement? Civilization? Portsmouth has spent 2023 answering that question with parades, art exhibits, films, concerts, and every type of gathering you can imagine. Here, tonight, we use music and poetry to explore the streets and stories at this point in time, while also reaching back to what Portsmouth may have looked and felt like before it was Portsmouth, before it was the homelands of the Abenaki people, or before man walked on this earth, at these precise coordinates. The first European arrivals carried more musical instruments than bibles, so our gathering here tonight feels all the more appropriate.

At This Point is divided into a number of short sections, each giving voice and musical expression to a time or a place in Portsmouth’s history. The narrator introduces the settlers of 1623, and their strident oboes (fourteen of them in tow) co-ordinate us. A seeking musical figure leads us through the landscape. The choir enters and paints a scene of early life here along the rocky coastline, before the narrator returns, reaching into the future to picture a time yet to come, and asks us to consider how we will be viewed by future generations.

A bell tolls and the soprano soloist takes us back to a time before 1623. A time when the laws of man and nature are blurred, and the sounds of the water and land are more audible than they are today. The land, the river, and the sea are very much alive and in tune with a time that precedes our own.

Abruptly the choir transports us to a peculiar brand of mid-20th century optimism. The orchestra transforms itself into light-music accompaniment and the choir slides around with chromatic slickness. Strawbery Banke, with all of its present-day positives, comes out of a complicated moment in American history. In the 1950s and ’60s the panacea of “urban renewal” dealt actual harm to historic buildings and deeply rooted existing communities that were being displaced across the nation—all in the name of progress. The benefits and joys of Strawbery Banke today are evident, but the wounds of its creation must also be remembered—as the wounds of Portsmouth’s own early years (which Strawbery Banke commemorates and commodifies) must be remembered—“slaves in the field . . . the heathen slaughtered” and the coming Revolution.

The narrator returns in the voice of the thirteen unmarked graves discovered in 2003 on Chestnut Street—about 100 yards from where we now sit. It had been long known that an African Burying Ground existed in the area—which at the time of its use was quite distant from what we would call the small community’s center—but its precise location hadn’t been known until that point. This discovery prompted a moment of reckoning for the community, with the subsequent creation of a poignant monument and the reinterment of the coffins, now restored and re-honored.

The English spoken in 1623 was the language of Shakespeare, Milton, and King James I. It is still (mostly) intelligible to us across those years—although as historian Dennis Robinson has suggested, it would be next to impossible for us to comprehend the speech of Portsmouth’s first settlers through their thick dialects and wooden teeth. What happens when we go back farther into pre-history on these grounds? How do we communicate with our deep predecessors? And they with us? The section, “Point of Graves,” ponders these questions.

The last days of the Puddle Dock were perhaps not the finest in Portsmouth’s history, but certainly one of its most colorful! The area now known as Prescott Park was once home to a vibrant community of shops, homes, and brothels. This faux sea-chantey tells some of the stories that come out of this time and place, culminating with a reflection on what is lost when communities (even less “civilized” ones) give way to progress.

Finally we hear the sounds of a bustling Market Square at holiday time. The peal of the North Church bell is heard chiming away, defining and celebrating time—celebrating our time together, here and now. We now look to the future, to outer space (the next frontier?), and to new exploration as Portsmouth moves forward, defining—as always—its own idiosyncratic path. 

400 years from tonight, who and where will our descendants be? Will they speak the same language? Sail the same waters? What will they make of us?

© Gregory W. Brown and Todd Hearon 2023

This co-commission with The Music Hall is supported in part
by an Alfred Nash Patterson Grant from Choral Arts New England
and The Gateway Fund.