I. 

Spes and doaivu are both words for hope, yet they come from vastly different traditions.Spes is Latin, the language used in the Catholic church, and doaivu is Sami, an indigenous language from Northern Scandinavia. These two cultures have often come into conflict, even though they both seek peace and understanding. In 2012, after centuries of oppression, the Bishop of Oulu, Finland formally asked for forgiveness from the Sami people. Composer Mia Makaroff sets these two traditions in dialogue, weaving text from Ecclesiastes with the poetry of Nils Aslak Valkeapää, a beloved Sámi singer, poet, and artist. Ecclesiastes asks who among us is truly wise, and reminds us that no one can stop the wind or forestall death. Valkeapää wrote from a similar place of acceptance: I belong to the wind, but I live. Maybe that is the meaning of life. Both texts share the same insight, that humility before what we cannot control is what softens us, and that hope is present whenever people are humble enough to seek understanding.

II.

The next three songs all share the image of a shore, but each gives it a different meaning.

Dayung Sampan, meaning "Row the Sampan," began as an Indonesian folk song before being taken up by immigrants who came to Singapore in the 19th century. Arranged by Singaporean composer Darius Lim, the song celebrates these fearless immigrants in search of a new life, undaunted by the perilous ocean voyage, and pulled forward by the hope of what awaited them.

Suo Gân simply means "lullaby" in Welsh (suo: to lull, cân: song). Anonymous in origin, it was first recorded in print around 1800. Its text is an intimate portrait of a mother's reassurance: nothing at the door is frightening, nothing outside will cause harm. Even the sound of a lonely wave lulling at the seashore becomes a source of comfort rather than danger. As the second in our set of three songs about shores and crossings, Suo Gân offers a moment of rest, the shore as a place of safety and tenderness rather than a threshold to be crossed.

I've Got a Mother Gone to Glory closes the set with a different kind of shore entirely. Where Dayung Sampan looks toward a shore not yet reached, and Suo Gân rests safely on one already arrived at, this traditional Appalachian song gazes toward a golden shore beyond this life altogether.  Rooted in the shape-note and revival singing traditions of the southern Appalachian mountains, the song is a quiet declaration of faith and a tender expression of grief: loved ones gone ahead, a reunion promised somewhere over yonder.

III.

I've Got a Mother Gone to Glory opens a door that the next three songs walk through, dwelling at the threshold between this world and the next, where grief, love, and longing reach toward what lies beyond.

Awasis is a Cree word meaning "child." Canadian composer Andrew Balfour is of Cree heritage and has made it his life's work to explore Indigenous history and identity through music, using it as a powerful entry point to healing. That mission is deeply personal: as an infant, Balfour himself was taken from his family as part of the "Sixties Scoop." The Sixties Scoop was part of a longer legacy of Indian Residential Schools, where generations of Indigenous children were removed from their families, forbidden from speaking their languages, and stripped of their cultures. Tragically, many children died at these schools, far from their families and their home. Balfour describes Awasis as a sound prayer: a dedication to the memory of those children and an act of love across the boundary of death. In the spirit world, he tells us, they are free, loved, and held by their ancestors.

Mata del Ánima Sola, meaning "Tree of the Lonely Soul," is a setting of a poem by Alberto Arvelo Torrealba, one of Venezuela's great "Bards of the Plains." In Latin American folk tradition, the ánima sola is a soul suspended between this world and the next, longing for what lies on the other side. Torrealba draws on this image to evoke the solitude and mystery of the llanos, the vast high plains of Venezuela, where a lone tree stands as a silent witness to the passage of time and the passage of souls. The music moves between stillness and exuberance, contrasting moments of quiet meditation with the joropo, a lively traditional Venezuelan dance where the choir imitates the instruments of the joropo ensemble: the top voices imitate the diatonic harp, while the rest of the choir takes the rhythm of the cuatro, a small four-stringed guitar.

Rise My Soul belongs to the shape-note singing tradition, a form of communal worship music that took root in rural American communities in the 18th and 19th centuries. Geometric shapes were added to noteheads on written music, allowing singers to read music without formal training. The text is a classic pilgrim hymn, framing the soul as a traveler passing through a temporary world, urged to press onward toward its true home. The arrangement weaves the melody through the voices in overlapping fragments, building the simple tune into something rich with counterpoint and forward momentum.

IV. 

The next three songs remind us that folk music is a living tradition, not only preserved but actively created. Each was written by a living composer responding to a culture that has survived deliberate suppression, offering new songs to communities whose traditions were taken, silenced, or nearly lost.

The Sleepy Song (A Cree Lullaby) was inspired by a lullaby that composer Sherryl Sewepagaham's great-grandmother sang to her father when he was a child. Though he no longer remembers the melody, he carries the memory of being sung to while swinging in a wîwîp'son, a traditional Cree baby swing constructed of ropes or sinew and cloth, hung between tipi poles so that parents could rock their child from bed. The wîwîp'son is still used in Indigenous homes today. Sewepagaham draws on the Cree tradition of lullabies sung by mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and older sisters, weaving words of love and comfort around the image of a precious child. The rattles represent the swishing sounds a baby hears in the womb, a first language of comfort the body already knows. In giving this song to her community, Sewepagaham does what folk musicians have always done: she offers music to mark the cycles of our lives and our communities. 

Mahk Jchi is a contemporary song by the Native American a cappella group Ulali, sung in Tutelo and Saponi, extinct dialects of the Sioux nation from the Ohio Valley. The text is a declaration of resilience passed from ancestors to the living. In singing these words in an extinct dialect, Ulali reclaims something that was on the verge of disappearing entirely.. 

I Tell the Truth sets a poem inspired by the Sheela-na-gig, carved stone figures found in medieval churches and castles throughout Ireland, though similar figures appear across European prehistory, millennia before Christianity came to the island. Sheela-na-gigs are female figures, often depicted with exaggerated sexual features, whose meaning has long been contested. For centuries they were dismissed by the Church as expressions of sin and lust, yet many scholars now understand them as far older symbols rooted in pagan goddess traditions and the creative energy of the universe. Susan Connolly's poem Female Figure. Sheela-na-gig, White Island, Lough Erne, gives the Sheela a voice: after centuries of being hidden, misread, and silenced, she speaks. She grins, she laughs, she tells the truth. The composer was drawn to this poem in the wake of Ireland's growing reckoning with the Magdalene Laundries, institutions where women were confined, exploited, and silenced under the cover of religious authority. The Sheela becomes a symbol of everything that was suppressed and is now insisting on being seen. The piece moves through three sections: from hiddenness, to a fertility chant and dance, to laughter as an act of survival and witness. Having previously only been performed in Ireland, Musae is proud to offer the North American premiere of this piece, and the world premiere of the treble arrangement, made specially for Musae.

V.

Birds appear in each of these final three songs, though each time they offer something different: the gift of song, the grief of loss, and the promise of freedom

Lauliku Lapsepõli, meaning "The Songster's Childhood," is a traditional Estonian folk song belonging to the ancient regilaul tradition, one of the oldest surviving folk song forms in the world. Its text tells of a child rocked in a cradle in a meadow, listening to birds sing and learning their songs like a language. Veljo Tormis, one of Estonia's most beloved composers, spent his life setting folk songs for choir, working under Soviet occupation at a time when Estonian cultural identity was actively suppressed. He famously said of his relationship to this music: "It is not I who makes use of folk music. It is folk music that makes use of me." In his arrangement, a simple melody passes between voices in an overlapping loop, as if the song itself is being handed from one singer to the next, the way folk music has always traveled.

Las Amarillas, meaning "the yellow ones," takes its name from the calandria, a bright yellow songbird native to Mexico. The text describes the calandrias flying away from their home, unhappy with what they find there, leaving the world quieter without their song. It is a moment of loss and defiance wrapped inside a song that is anything but mournful. The piece is a huapango, a lively southern Mexican dance form with roots in the Spanish fandango, characterized by a "floating downbeat" whose rhythmic emphasis keeps slipping away just as the ear expects to find it. The result is music that is, in the arranger's own words, "hot-blooded and haughty, a mixture of delight and disdain." Like the birds in the text, the music itself will not be contained.

I'll Fly Away was born in a cotton field in Oklahoma in 1929, where a young Albert Brumley was working and humming "The Prisoner's Song," a popular ballad about a man longing for wings to fly over prison walls to the arms of his darling. It suddenly occurred to him, he later said, that he could use the whole world as the prison and heaven as the freedom. That reimagining took three years to complete and was published in 1932. It has since been called the most recorded gospel song in American history, equally at home in church pews, bluegrass jam sessions, and New Orleans jazz funerals, carried along by a melody so irresistible it seems eternal. The arranger Jonathan Rodgers grew up singing this song at gospel homecoming nights, where its infectious two-beat rhythm made it a congregational favorite. His a cappella arrangement honors those roots while giving the song a fresh voice, letting the chorus do what it has always done: lift the spirit and draw voices outward in celebration.