On the Longing of Early Explorers, for soprano and electronics, is a setting of a poem from Elizabeth Bradfield’s Approaching Ice, a volume which explores the history of polar—particularly Antarctic—exploration. The titular explorers are long-dead historical figures; their desire to uncover something truly “unspoiled” led them to the last corners of the earth, where, to their dismay (the poem suggests), they realized that their very arrival would sully the “unsullied” land they wished to discover. A similar paradox persists in the present day (in which “satellites [eye] the earth’s whole surface…”). Antarctica is still very much beyond the physical reach of the vast majority of living people, and yet, as polar climates continue to warm at alarming rates, it’s clear no “unspoiled” region is free from the corrupting, if unintended, effects of the spread of human technology. On the Longing of Early Explorers was written in 2017, and premiered in Bloomington, Indiana by soprano Maya Vansuch.
Recording: Maya Vansuch, soprano (Bloomington, Indiana, 2017). Copyright ℗ 2017 by Corey K. Rubin. All rights reserved.
Regarding the text: Elizabeth Bradfield, “On the Longing of Early Explorers” from Approaching Ice. Copyright © 2010 by Elizabeth Bradfield. Used by permission of Persea Books, Inc. (New York), www.perseabooks.com. All rights reserved. All rights reserved worldwide.
On the Longing of Early Explorers
Before satellites eyed the earth’s whole surface,
through the peephole of orbit, before,
we all were tracked by numbers trailing from us,
like a comet’s tail—O if only,
they’d say in quaint accents and obscure
sentence structures—if only the unsullied
could be discovered, if only, once found,
it could speak its own nobility and let us.
empathize. Poignant, the despair that itched
beneath their powdered wigs, their longing to touch
the unspoiled, their sense that the world was already ruined.
Elizabeth Bradfield