Mobile/Not Mobile/… 8 Haiku, is a setting of eight haiku found in Violet Kazue de Cristoforo’s book May Skies, There’s Always a Tomorrow, an Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku. Each of the volume’s 130+ haiku, set in free-style (kaiko haiku), distills into a few lines the realities of the detention camps where thousands of Japanese- American citizens were incarcerated during World War II. *

In collaborating on our new work, Roderick Williams, Iain Burnside and I selected 8 haiku by Shizuku Uyemarko, Yuko Fujikawa, Neiji Ozawa, Sagara Sei, Tokuji Hirai, Tojo Fujita and Hyakuissei Okamoto. Each haiku uses something familiar to us (train, dragonfly, cloud, seasons, wind/windless) as contemplations of patience, forbearance and ability to endure.

Honoring these qualities, we thought to create a concert program which uses the 8 haiku songs to frame and inspire eight sets of Western art-song. For the Schubert Club premiere Roderick and Iain chose 23 songs to make up 8 sets. We call this a concert in the form of an Alexander Calder mobile.

We intend that you perform Mobile/Not Mobile/… 8 Haiku either in mobile form or as its own set. If you adopt mobile form, let the haiku poetry inspire your choices for each song set.

Libby Larsen, 2025

* Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorized the mass forced removal and incarceration of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast. As a result of this order, some 110,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were removed from the West Coast, most to inland concentration camps. Executive Order 9066 lapsed at the end of the war and was eventually terminated by Proclamation 4417, signed by President Gerald Ford on February 19, 1976.