Martin Rokeach, Composer
Remembering We're Alive SATB chorus and piano
Written for the San Ramon Valley Chorale, their wonderful accompanist Nadia Koliha, and exceptional director Bruce Koliha.
Watch their April 2025 premiere performance featuring tenor soloist Jeffrey Howe.
Setting text to music is always hard -- finding just the right poem is even harder. It's no exaggeration to say that when Bruce Koliha invited me to compose a work for the San Ramon Valley Chorale I read over two hundred poems, many of them beautiful, in search of one that wasn't too long, nor too abstract, not too this or that, etc. etc. and most important, I had to resonate with the poem. In my search I visited used bookstores, libraries, the internet, and when I stumbled upon Steve Deutch's '"Looking for America" it instantly brought me to both my old hippie hitchhiking days and the present, my seventies, and the reality that time is short and getting shorter by the day.
Small Title
Small Title
Steve Deutsch
Looking for America
Let us be best friends one last time –
Roll out the old Ford and take that trip
We so often dreamed of when young.
Head to the west coast on those two lane roads
that once were America.
Remember when we were America too?
Fill that old Ford with chips and beer –
the radio set to the “Nothing but Oldies” Station.
loud enough to remind us we are still alive.
Swap lies with the locals
in pubs on Main Street
and sample the biscuits and bacon
in dozens of mom and pop diners
in what was once the heartland –
a thousand dots on a tattered gas station map
long ago bypassed and nearly forgotten.
And when the Ford throws a rod
in Kansas or Colorado,
as of course it must,
we can unfold the aluminum lawn chairs
and sit on the berm to wait for the sunset.
Used with permission
Remembering We're Alive will be performed Nov. 2, 2025 at Sacramento State University's annual Festival of New American Music.
Poet Steve Deutsch
From the desk of Christine Potter, Poetry Editor of Eclectica Magazine, after viewing the video:
This is how this joint works when it works well. An absolutely stunning setting of a poem by someone I don't know in my daily life, but see online from time to time. Did I say I was blown away? I haven't seen or heard this time of the world captured so well ever.