The Things the Cornfields Keep: An American Oratorio
A new multidisciplinary work
by Matthew P. Haubert
Fracture & Form
There are places that remember us long after we have forgotten them.
The roads we grew up on. The houses we left behind. The churches, factories, kitchens, empty parking lots, and small towns that continue to exist long after the people who once filled them have moved on.
And then there are the cornfields.
They stand at the edges of our lives, season after season. They witness the passing of generations without asking anything of them. They remain through childhood, adulthood, departures, returns, and the quiet disappearance of things we once believed would always be there.
I am beginning work on The Things the Cornfields Keep: An American Oratorio, an ambitious, long-form artistic project exploring the ordinary human experience through the landscape, memory, and cultural history of the American Midwest.
This will be one of the largest creative undertakings I have attempted.
An Oratorio About Ordinary Lives
The project will bring together original classical composition, piano, chamber music, vocal and choral writing, original songs, poetry, prose, spoken word, field recordings, and visual art.
Rather than approaching the oratorio as a single musical composition, I envision it as an interconnected body of work: a musical, literary, and visual portrait of a place and the people who inhabit it.
It is not intended to be a conventional autobiography, nor is it an attempt to romanticize rural America.
I am interested in the lives that rarely become the subject of grand narratives.
The factory worker driving home after a long shift. The waitress closing a restaurant at midnight. A father sitting quietly in the kitchen. A child standing in the back of a church. Someone leaving their hometown without knowing whether they will ever return. Someone who never leaves at all.
These lives are not insignificant because they are ordinary.
They are the subject.
Four Seasons
The work will be organized around four movements, following the changing seasons of the Midwestern landscape.
I. Spring — What We Inherit
Childhood, family, faith, innocence, identity, and the places that shape us before we understand what they mean.
II. Summer — What We Become
Love, work, ambition, relationships, mistakes, departure, and the complicated business of becoming an adult.
III. Autumn — What We Lose
Memory, regret, addiction, aging, separation, the disappearance of familiar places, and the realization that time has been moving whether we noticed it or not.
IV. Winter — What Remains
Silence, solitude, uncertainty, memory, and continuation. Not necessarily redemption. Not necessarily resolution. Simply the things that remain after everything else has changed.
The Sound of the Work
Musically, I intend to explore a language that moves between intimate piano writing, chamber orchestration, minimalist textures, vocal composition, and larger choral passages.
There will be moments of stillness and moments of scale. Some pieces may exist almost entirely within the sound of a piano. Others may require strings, voices, layered recordings, and the collective presence of a choir.
Field recordings will also play an important role. The sounds of the Midwest—wind moving through fields, distant traffic, rain, machinery, church bells, the hum of an ordinary room—may become part of the musical fabric.
The landscape will not simply be the setting. It will be a voice within the work.
Alongside the music, I plan to develop a companion collection of poetry, prose, and lyrics, as well as a series of visual works that extend the project’s themes beyond the concert hall and the printed page.
Why the Cornfields?
Because they have always been there.
They have stood beside the roads we traveled as children and the roads we took when we left. They have watched houses appear and disappear. They have remained through harvests, winters, droughts, and generations of people whose names they will never know.
There is something profoundly human about that relationship between permanence and disappearance.
We spend our lives trying to understand where we came from, what happened to us, and what we leave behind. We assign meaning to places because they hold pieces of our history.
The fields do not answer.
But perhaps the work of art is to listen anyway.
A Long-Term Under taking
This project will take time. It is not something I intend to rush into existence simply to meet a release date.
The compositions, writing, recordings, and visual works will develop together, allowing the project to grow into the form it requires.
There will be a great deal of work ahead: composing, writing, arranging, recording, revising, and building a cohesive artistic world from individual pieces.
I am approaching this as a long-term commitment and as an opportunity to create something that exists beyond the boundaries of a conventional album or book.
I do not know exactly what the finished work will look like yet.
That is part of beginning.
What I do know is that I want to make something that pays attention. Something that gives ordinary lives the space and dignity they deserve. Something that recognizes the beauty, difficulty, loneliness, humor, and uncertainty of being alive in a particular place and time.
This is not a story about everything turning out all right.
It is a record of what happened, what was remembered, and what remained.
The Things the Cornfields Keep: An American Oratorio
A new project by Matthew P. Haubert.
Fracture & Form.
The land remembers. The walls remember. We remember.
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