World Premiere:
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
In the first week of November, during America Week “Woodstock aan de Waal” (Nijmegen, the Netherlands), the world premiere will take place of a work by American composer William Harvey, set to words by Renée Nicole Good. The story connected to this performance is quite remarkable.
The composition for mezzosoprano and strings, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” will be performed twice by Hebe de Champeaux and string players from the Nijmeegs Symfonie Orkest (SON). The performances will be:
On Thursday, November 5th during the concert ‘We the People’ by Kamerkoor Audite Nova in Titus Brandsma Memorial;
Order tickets for the thursday concert.On Friday, November 6th during the concert of Nijmegen Symfonie Orkest (SON) in Concert Hall “De Vereeniging”.
Order tickets for the friday concert.
Both concerts are part of the "Woodstock aan de Waal" symposium.
Background: the murder of Renée Nicole Good
On January 7 of this year, 37-year-old Renée Nicole Good was shot dead in Minneapolis by agents of the immigration and customs enforcement agency ICE. Along with others, Good monitored ICE activities. At that time ICE was conducting a fierce campaign in Minneapolis and other Democrat-led cities to arrest and deport as many migrants as possible, whether legal or not. The murder of Renée Good shocked people worldwide and led to intense protests against ICE and the Trump administration, which is held accountable for her death. Renée Good was a mother of three children and lived in Minneapolis with her partner and youngest child. Besides being a human rights activist, she was a writer and poet. In 2020, she won the Academy of American Poets Prize with the poem 'On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.'
The Composition
Immediately after news of Renée Good’s murder broke, William Harvey—an American composer living and working in Mexico—decided to set her award-winning 2020 poem to music. Within a few days, he composed a piece for mezzo-soprano and piano. He contacted his former fellow student Hebe de Champeaux and offered her the piece to perform. Born and educated in the US, Hebe has lived in the Netherlands for many years and works as a conductor, violinist, and mezzo-soprano. From 2010 to 2024, she served as the conductor of Kamerkoor Audite Nova
In late January, a conversation between Hebe and Nico de Milliano (a member of Audite Nova and coordinator of the Woodstock Week) sparked the idea of performing William Harvey’s piece during the Woodstock Week in early November. Subsequently, discussions involving Nico, Hebe, and the Nijmegen Symphony Orchestra led to the idea of performing the piece twice. Especially for this world premiere in Nijmegen, William Harvey created an arrangement of the original version for mezzo-soprano and strings.
The Poem: text
The full text reads as follows:
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
i want back my rocking chairs,
solipsist sunsets,
& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.
i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores
(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—
the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):
remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,
& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.
under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat
ribosome
endoplasmic—
lactic acid
stamen
at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—
i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—
maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.
it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.
can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom
now i can’t believe—
that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—
all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:
life is merely
to ovum and sperm
and where those two meet
and how often and how well
and what dies there.
The Poem: meaning
The title refers to a teaching method widely used in anatomy classes at American high schools and universities. This clinical, scientific procedure—of which the poet also holds personal memories—serves in the poem as a metaphor for how the human mind grapples with harsh reality, alienation, the loss of innocence, our connection to nature, and— ultimately — matters of life and death. Dissection also acts as a means of maintaining control. The poem can be viewed as a plea not to reduce everything to comprehensible units, but to continue approaching the world from a holistic perspective as well.
Following Renée Good’s death, the poem drew considerable attention. It is now interpreted largely in the light of her own violent death and viewed as a protest against reducing people to categories—as entailed by Trump’s policies and their implementation by ICE. Viewed in this light, the final lines, in particular, can be seen as grimly ironic. *)
The Performance
The composition has not yet been performed, and no recordings are available as of yet. Hebe de Champeaux characterizes the composition as follows:
“The piece is highly colorful and deeply connected to the text of the poem by Renee Good. It is certainly not ‘squeak-and-crunch’ modern music. Expressive, fluid vocal lines set within a multi-tonal context alternate with busy runs and shifting time signatures. The piece concludes with a suddenly simple texture featuring highly expressive, tasteful dissonances that capture the true meaning of the poem in sound. It is a work about life and death. Harvey’s compositional style reminds me of a modern Richard Strauss combined with Schumann. It is truly brilliantly composed for the voice, as the placement of the vocal lines in relation to the text is absolutely perfect. In the phrase "all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest," the notes for "onto the chest" lie precisely in the chest register, while the music for "dribbles down" ripples towards that point.”
The Composer
William Harvey was born in Flint, Michigan, in 1982. He studied violin at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and also studied composition with Sven David Sandström. He was the first American to serve as concertmaster of the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico. In 2005, he founded Cultures in Harmony, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting international diplomacy through music. From 2010 to 2014, he worked in Kabul, where he taught violin and conducted the Afghanistan National Youth Orchestra.
For more information about William Harvey:
Cultures in Harmony | We Bring People Together Through Music
The Performers:
Hebe de Champeaux
Hebe is a versatile orchestral and choral conductor based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She has led ensembles around the world and has studied with—and attended masterclasses by—some of the world’s greatest conductors, including Kurt Masur and Jorma Panula. She holds a Master of Music in instrumental conducting from Indiana University Bloomington and a Bachelor of Music in choral conducting from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. We asked Hebe what it is like for her—as someone who is originally American—to sing this emotionally charged piece in the current climate. She shared the following:
“An American citizenship, next to the Dutch one, feels like a burden. And while I know that millions of people would figuratively, or literally, be willing to cut off a leg to acquire such a document, this identity feels to me like an uncomfortable and quite diseased garment which I must either do my best to repair, or discard entirely. The more one delves into the convoluted history of this extremely young country, the more disturbing it becomes. I was raised in a place of comfort that has the miraculous quality of igniting the pursuance of excellence, innovation, and free thinking (California), but only later didi I realise the dark side of the coin: the total exploitation of the rest of the world, and the slaughter and sometimes utter annihilation of other peoples, including the Native Americans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Palestinians, Japanese, and more. It was the moment that the guns turned inwards towards its own (white) citizens, that a significant amount of Americans who were perhaps previously lulled into the same acceptance as I was, were faced with the brutal reality of their own government. The two victims: Alex Pretti and Renée Good. It is with a hardened heart, but with much respect and admiration, that I sing one of Good’s poems set to music by William Harvey. William is a brilliant and extremely interesting figure. He and I both worked at music schools in politically significant and controversial places at the beginning of our careers: I in Palestine, and he in Afghanistan. I could safely say that these experiences were formative for us, and perhaps helped us to shake the American lifestyle and expectations from our eyes. The wide spectrum of his activities as a violinist, conductor, and composer resonates with me. We seem to be birds of a similar feather, and so it is with great thanks that I embrace this opportunity to bring his and Renée Good’s composition to Nijmegen in November. “
For more information about Hebe de Champeaux: www.hebedechampeaux.nl
String players from the Nijmegen Symphony Orchestra
On Thursday, November 5 (Audite Nova concert), Hebe will be accompanied by the SON Quintet, consisting of five members of the Nijmegen Symphony Orchestra: Lisa van Dongen (1st violin), Jacquemijn Hutter (2nd violin), Wilma van Donk (viola), Cyriel Tönissen (cello), and Jeroen Aerts (double bass).
On Friday, November 6 (Nijmegen Symphony Orchestra concert), Hebe will be accompanied by the full string section of the Nijmegen Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Peter Bogaert.
For more information about SON see the website of SON