We are pleased to present the following for our Holiday Concert on December 16, entitled The Choral Arc of the Universe is Song. The Singers fall musical program highlights matters of critical importance in our unsettled world, immigration and the immigrant experience among them. Conrad Susa’s Carols and Lullabies, a collection of ten Spanish-themed songs, uses texts of Basque, Catalonian, Puerto Rican, Spanish, Andalucian, Castilian, and Mexican origin to spin a narrative of many moods and rhythms. The other featured work is a cantata of the Ellis Island experience, The Golden Door, by Ronald Perera, which draws on oral histories of immigrants. As Perera himself put it, "In the simple, flat prose of these interviews I found poetry, and I found universal human themes of uprooting and transplanting, longing and hope, suffering and fear, courage and despair, and—perhaps most characteristic among immigrants to America—gratitude.