Scott Ordway

PREMIERE

Composed for the Rutgers University Glee Club and Brandon Williams

Premiere: April 2024 at Nicholas Music Center (New Brunswick, NJ)
Rutgers University Glee Club; Brandon Williams, conductor

MEDIA

NOTE

In 1948, a subcommittee of the nascent United Nations General Assembly crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document which reflects both the trauma and the optimism of the immediate postwar period and is now recognized as a landmark text in the global history of human and civil rights.

Anyone reading it, however, will recognize that many of its provisions remain wildly aspirational and unevenly distributed. It espouses ideals of which we perennially fall short, but which are still worth aspiring to. We must credit its authors for the fact that they valued these forward-looking rights, and for their strength to believe that the future could be better than the past.

To create the text, I selected lines directly from the Declaration. I lightly edited some of them in order to make them more suitable for use as a text for music. I have set them in the second person in order to create a more dramatic dialogue between the singers and their audience.

In making my selections, I sought to focus on the rights which are most relevant to our public discourse in 2024. These include rights which are resonant because they have been fully secured only recently, as well as rights which remain stubbornly insecure in some parts of the world.

—Scott Ordway (2024)

TEXT

Text adapted by Scott Ordway from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)

You are all born free.

You have the right to be free from

Slavery 

Servitude

Torture

Inhuman or degrading treatment

Discrimination

Arbitrary arrest, or

Exile

These rights belong to you:

Life and

Security of person

Recognition before the law

Equal protection

A fair and public hearing

To be presumed innocent

To marry and found a family,

To equal rights during marriage 

(and to its dissolution)

Motherhood and childhood should have special care



You have the right to

Freedom of conscience, thought, and religion

Freedom to change your belief, 

Alone or with others, 

In public or in private

You have the right to work

To just conditions of the work

To equal pay for equal work

To rest and leisure

A standard of your living

To education and your 

Clothing, and your housing, and your care

To a nationality 

To seek asylum and protection

To leave your country, and return

You are all born free,

And so you have these rights.