emergency shelter intake form

PROGRAM NOTE

In the spring of 2016, I received a phone call from Charles Calmer at the Oregon Symphony. He asked if I would write a substantial work for the orchestra having to do with housing and homelessness, twin crises facing nearly every major metropolitan area in the United States, Portland being no exception. My initial instinct was to run for the hills—an ivory tower institution commissioning and presenting a piece about poverty for their largely well-to-do audience? The optics seemed untenable. At the same time, I knew the Oregon Symphony to be a phenomenal band, and it seemed foolish to pass up the opportunity to write for them. More to the point, however: I couldn’t help but respect the organization’s desire to grapple directly with issues facing their community, even if it felt ethically complicated. I agreed to write the piece, but remained uncertain as to how I would address the prompt without either speaking on behalf of a community with which I have little experience, and/or creating a maudlin and sentimental portrait of homelessness.

When I began work on the piece, a few things had become clear. Homelessness, I came to understand, is best thought of as a symptom of inequality, and is but one of the myriad ways in which poverty is experienced. As I write this, inequality has become so extreme that billionaires are publishing open letters demanding that they be taxed at higher rates, and mainstream economists throughout the political spectrum acknowledge that the current distribution of wealth and income may increase the likelihood of societal breakdown. On the human level, inequality plays out in the lives of tens of millions of Americans whose sense of economic stability is increasingly precarious. One recent study found that nearly half of all American families struggle to balance a basic monthly budget of necessities.

Meanwhile, for those of us who have not experienced homelessness or do not work in the field, it is easy to make broad assumptions about what leads to loss of housing. These assumptions are often predicated on what we see on the street, where mental illness and substance abuse are frequently on display. But in studying housing insecurity more closely, one learns that in many locales, the vast majority who experience homelessness are invisible: they are doubled up with family and friends, staying in shelters, hotels, motels, or even in encampments unseen by the broader public. And in these cases, it is frequently job loss, illness, accident, or the need to care for a loved one, that leads to a situation in which an individual must decide between, say, paying rent or keeping the lights on. In that sense, emergency shelter intake form is not about a marginalized fraction of the population. Instead, it tries to depict all of those who have ever felt financial precarity, and to demonstrate that we are all more proximate to the experience of homelessness than we might at first imagine.

Finally, I knew that in order to have a fighting chance of doing this subject justice, I would need to include the voices of those whose lives bear witness to a society that fails to guarantee the basic economic dignity of its most vulnerable citizens. To that end, I asked the Oregon Symphony if it would be possible to assemble a chorus comprising individuals who’d experienced homelessness or other forms of housing insecurity, and the intrepid Monica Hayes, Director of Education and Outreach, sprang into action. A few weeks later, she’d made contact with the Maybelle Community Singers, a program of the Maybelle Community Center, which has for several decades sought to create community for those living in poverty, driven by the hypothesis (now borne out by scientific data) that poverty is often accompanied by social isolation, and that social isolation can have deleterious effects on health.

Although they sing in only the last movement, the Maybelle Community Singers are at the heart of this piece, and I am forever grateful to them for their generosity of spirit in contributing their hearts and voices to this project. I am grateful, too, for the moral clarity of my other collaborators: Alicia Hall Moran, Holland Andrews, Holcombe Waller, Carlos Kalmar, and last but not least, the incredible Oregon Symphony.

— Gabriel Kahane, November 2019

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