Melissa Dunphy

About

Commissioned for the Saint Louis Chamber Chorus (Philip Barnes, Artistic Director) in celebration of one of its finest singers, Suzanne Ramsey Haubein, by her family, Mark, Sienna, Cailyn and Luke.

Artwork by Will H. Chandlee for The Suffragist, Nov 22, 1913.

Lyrics

I. Voice
By Zona Gale, published in The Springfield Daily Republican, Dec 15, 1929

You have a secret Voice, always singing.
It is never still. It runs with your haste
And idles in your silence. It is everywhere.
O you, for whom this passionate Voice sings
And will not be silent, think now of those
For whom no voice sounds.

Oh, can you not hear that the song your Voice is singing
Is the song which is to bring that world of theirs
Into the light?

Why else do you imagine that this Voice is singing?
Why else do you imagine that the fire of love
Runs in your veins?


II. Our Country
By Anise, published in The Seattle Union Record, Nov 3, 1919

To all who hope for Freedom's gleam
Across the warring years,
Who offer life to build a dream
In laughter or in tears,
To all who toil, unmarked, unknown,
By city, field or sea,
I give my heart, I reach my hand,
A common hope, a common land
Is made of you and me.

For we have loved her summer dawns
Beyond the misty hill,
And we have shared her toil, her fruit
Of farm and shop and mill.
Our weaknesses have made her shame,
Our strength has built her powers,
And we have hoped and we have striven
That to her children might be given
A fairer world than ours.

We dreamed to hold her safe, apart
From strife; the dream was vain.
Her heart is now earth's bleeding heart,
She shares the whole earth's pain.
To those oppressed in all the lands
One flashing hope has gone,
One vision wide as earth appears,
We seek, across the warring years,
The gray world's golden dawn.


III. Novus ordo seclorum
Adapted from Vergil's Ecologue IV

The cycle of ages is born anew.
Justice returns to earth,
the Golden Age returns,
and its first-born comes down from heaven above.
Look kindly, chaste Lucina,
upon this infant's birth.
For with him shall hearts of iron cease,
and hearts of gold inherit the whole earth?
yes, Apollo reigns now.


IV. Youth
By Langston Hughes, published in The Crisis, Aug 1924

We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame

Yesterday
a night-gone thing,
A sun-down name.

And dawn to-day
Broad arch above the road we came.

We march!

Performances

• 15 Feb, 2026: Saint Louis Chamber Chorus at Salem United Methodist Church, St. Louis, MO