Kinetic Ensemble preview The Strangers’ Case

On November 22nd, Kinetic Ensemble, Houston’s conductorless chamber ensemble previewed The Strangers’ Case, an upcoming song cycle for voice and string orchestra. The work gathers together poems, personal accounts and other literary sources drawn from the American immigrant experience. Its title is borrowed from Shakespeare’s monologue for Sir Thomas More, which eloquently argues for empathy and compassion towards displaced people. The Strangers’ Case was funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance. A feature on the program appeared in the Houston Chronicle.

Kinetic’s program, curated by Tonya Burton (viola) and Austin Lewellen (bass), featured “When Dawn Comes to the City,” based on text by Harlem renaissance poet (and Jamaican immigrant) Claude McKay, sung by soprano Alexandra Smither. The song reflects a nostalgia and yearning for home that is a recurring theme in McKay’s work.

The tired cars go grumbling by,
The moaning, groaning cars,
And the old milk carts go rumbling by
Under the same dull stars.
Out of the tenements, cold as stone,
Dark figures start for work;
I watch them sadly shuffle on,
’Tis dawn, dawn in New York.

But I would be on the island of the sea,
In the heart of the island of the sea,
Where the cocks are crowing, crowing, crowing,
And the hens are cackling in the rose-apple tree,
Where the old draft-horse is neighing, neighing, neighing,
Out on the brown dew-silvered lawn,
And the tethered cow is lowing, lowing, lowing,
And dear old Ned is braying, braying, braying,
And the shaggy Nannie goat is calling, calling, calling
From her little trampled corner of the long wide lea
That stretches to the waters of the hill-stream falling
Sheer upon the flat rocks joyously!
There, oh, there! on the island of the sea,
There I would be at dawn.

—CLAUDE McKAY

The Strangers’ Case will be presented in its entirety in January 2026, as a co-presentation of Musiqa and Kinetic. Several of its texts are taken from a unique 1906 publication entitled Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told By Themselves, a series of personal, turn-of-the-century accounts by immigrants to the United States: “Lady in the Harbor” is the story of a young Polish girl destined for the textile sweatshops, and “Such an Illumination” from a Syrian refugee fleeing persecution in his homeland. “Island of Angels” excerpts lines written in the wake of the 1882 Asian Exclusion Act. This anonymous poem, translated from the Chinese, was found inscribed on the wooden walls of a San Francisco Bay immigrant detention facility. The cycle will also include a remarkable and prescient 1908 poem by Arthur Upson, “The Statue of Liberty (New York Harbor, A.D. 2900)” that imagines the New York harbor of the far future: the Statue of Liberty is unearthed, sunken in the mire, discovered by a “tyrant who misrules our land.”