[ Orchestra playing ] [ Choir harmonizing ] Woman: [ Singing ] Oh God.

What a beautiful machine.

Man: [ Singing ] Machine.

Woman: All this breathing ivory.

Both: [ Singing ] Speaking to the world.

Oh, God.

di Mura: [ Singing ] What a beautiful machine.

[ Normal voice ] You know, this beautiful, soulful female voice, right?

The simple choice would have been, you know, let's make it pretty.

Komunyakaa: Toss off.

di Mura: Right.

Komunyakaa: Yeah, but it isn't.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think of language as music.

Poetry, in a certain sense, invites us in as participants, but the music brings it all together.

di Mura: Because there's music in the poetry.

Komunyakaa: Yeah.

That's why, as I'm writing, I'm usually saying everything aloud as well.

Oh, God, what a beautiful machine.

All this breathing ivory speaking to the world.

Narrator: Yusef Komunyakaa is a renowned poet whose work draws deeply from his childhood in Louisiana and his time serving in the Vietnam War.

His celebrated collection of poetry, "Neon Vernacular", earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. di Mura: I'll never forget the first time I met him, because he came walking in the door with a copy of "Neon Vernacular", and having never met me, signed it and invited me to the house for dinner.

But that's the kind of person he is.

Narrator: Vince di Mura is a composer in residence at Princeton University.

His collaborations with Yusef Komunyakaa have spanned decades.

[ Keyboard playing ] "Oh God...Beautiful Machine", their fourth collaboration, is a symphonic pairing of music and language.

di Mura: Watch this.

[ Singing ] There was a time we could sing of springtime.

Both: [ Laugh ] di Mura: [ Singing ] As if we ever will run out of choices.

Komunyakaa: [ Singing ] So we will never run out of choices.

di Mura: [ Normal voice ] Right.

Komunyakaa: [ Normal voice ] The journey begins with a question.

Larry Hilton, who's given so much to the community, he asked me, he said would I be willing to write a lyric that dealt with climate change?

Narrator: The late Larry Hilton, beloved patron of the arts and champion of Trenton's cultural community, asked his friends to create a big new piece focusing on climate change and the human experience.

Yusef and Vince eagerly agreed.

They created a work that brings together poetry, jazz, blues, samba, gospel, and even one movement featuring Chinese music and language.

Woman: [ Singing in Chinese ] Narrator: "Oh God...Beautiful Machine" then found its home with the Capital Philharmonic of New Jersey.

Grand: I think the Capital Philharmonic has always had an incredible tradition of supporting projects that are a little bit unusual.

It's going to have the real feel of a festival and the real feel of the city of Trenton coming together to put something that represents us.

di Mura: In some ways, it's like Larry's last gift to Trenton.

Komunyakaa: Mmm.

di Mura: Larry wanted this to be a big, major composition.

[ Orchestra playing ] Komunyakaa: It's naturally about nature and man reacting against this great apparatus out there.

Nature we don't think of as a machine, and yet all the pieces fall together as this great, mysterious moment.

[ Orchestra continues playing ] I was already there in the midst of climate change.

Growing up in Louisiana, I would go out into the vegetation and receive, in a way, the surprises that nature had for me.

There are the birds and butterflies and all that, but also the snakes, you know.

di Mura: [ Laughs ] Chimes.

[ Note plays ] Strings.

[ Note plays ] I had to listen to recordings of him reciting his work to understand how to phrase it musically.

Komunyakaa: When wind sang through the grass... di Mura: [ Singing lyrics ] of men and angry wills... [ Singing ] A million hooves of buffalo thundered over Oklahoma hills.

[ Indistinct chatter ] di Mura: Hi, everybody.

Just a word about "Buffalo Grass".

This was the first poem that Yusef gave me, and it was inspired by the fact that he saw in a magazine a picture from the 1880's of the destruction of the buffalo, that there were these mounds of skulls.

And he wrote this as a metaphor for the carelessness of how we treat nature.

Grand: Let's try from the beginning of "Buffalo Grass".

[ Drums softly booming ] [ Orchestra joins ] It's always interesting when people show up to the first rehearsal and have never seen the piece before, and everyone is hearing it for the first time.

It's a really special occasion.

But I've been in contact with Vince for many months as he's been completing this.

It's got that feel of marriage, of text and music.

[ Music plays ] Woman: [ Singing ] Komunyakaa: Sometimes the piece start breathing.

di Mura: Yeah.

Komunyakaa: It's alive.

di Mura: Oh, absolutely.

Komunyakaa: And what happens is that there's that push and pull.

That was the most exciting thing for me about it.

di Mura: I learned so much from Yusef's work, but I also learned so much from him, you know.

Komunyakaa: And I've learned from you as well.

di Mura: Yeah.

Komunyakaa: So it's been a shared voyage.

di Mura: Right.

Komunyakaa: The soul inside of his music presented a certain kind of humanity that brought everything together.

di Mura: I don't want to play with anybody else.

His work has spoken to me from the first day I read it.

Narrator: An audience filled the Patriots Theater at the War Memorial in Trenton for the 90 minute symphonic work on humanity's impact on this planet, an evening where two art forms, poetry and music, came together as one beat.

Woman: [ Singing ] [ Chorus joins ] [ Music continues ] [ Laughing together ] [ Audience applauds ]