Resonance Commissions | On This Land

Video of this performance coming later this year!

Commission information

Composer: Kenji Bunch
Text:
Chisao Hata
Conductor: Shohei Kobayashi
Duration: 10’00”
Instrumentation: SATB
Performances:

We Are Still Here (June 1, 2025) - world premiere

Commission story

More than 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, were forcibly removed from their homes and unjustly incarcerated during World War II.

In Portland, the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Center was hastily converted into the Portland Assembly Center,  one of fifteen temporary detention centers used to confine Japanese Americans before they were sent to more permanent concentration camps—such as Minidoka in Idaho.

From May to September 1942, approximately 3,676 Japanese and Japanese Americans from Oregon and southwest Washington were held at the Portland Assembly Center in overcrowded, makeshift conditions.

Today, that site is known as the Portland Expo Center. Our program, We Are Still Here, presented in partnership with Vanport Mosaic and the Portland Assembly Center Project, aimed to reactive this historic site for an afternoon of music, theatre, movement, and reclamation.

Artist Chisao Hata

Commissioned by Resonance Ensemble, Kenji Bunch’s work, On This Land, was one of two premieres by Kenji that weekend. The other premiere (commissioned & premiered by Chamber Music Northwest) interweaves music with narration by actor & activist George Takei, performing excerpts from his memoir— Lost Freedom: A Memory—reflecting on his time as a young boy in one of these incarceration centers.

The Resonance commission, On This Land, sets an original poem by Chisao Hata—the creator of the Portland Assembly Center Project.

Altar featured at We Are Still Here, the finale of the annual Vanport Mosaic festival.

ABOUT ON THIS LAND

Composer Kenji Bunch

“As I was reading through Chisao Hata’s searing and heartfelt poem “On This Land,” I noticed two elements in the text: one describing in stark detail the history of the Portland Assembly Center, and another asking the reader to imagine how this experience must have felt to the prisoners themselves. To highlight this duality in the words, I split the choir into two antiphonal groups, one delivering facts and the other asking for our empathy. Gradually the two groups begin to merge and finally come together at the very end.

program note by Kenji Bunch