\ The CD is the premiere release of music composed for the Esse Chamber Music Players that highlights the fascinating culture and history of the Merrimack Valley in Massachusetts. The area is rich in the cultural contributions of Native American societies and European settlers, as well as the historic textures of exploration, the struggle for independence, the Civil War, the Age of Industrialization, the Civil Rights Movement, and environmentalism. It is the Valley of the Poets, home of Anne Dudley Bradstreet, John Greenleaf Whittier, Robert Frost, and others. The CD shares beautiful verses from Contemplations by Anne Dudley Bradstreet, America’s first published poet, set to music by David Bennett Thomas. Listeners will hear an homage to the Haverhill shoe industry in Queen Slipper Serenade by David McMullin and can imagine spending June on the Merrimack through the vision of newspaper editor and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, set to music by Charles Ray Loring. Included is J. Windel Brown’s musical representation of the periods of Whittier’s life: Boyhood Idyll, Discovery, Editor and Abolitionist, and Amesbury, Late Poetry. The life of Horace N. Stevens of industrial-era J.P. Stevens & Co., and the mill-owning Stevens family of North Andover and New Jersey, is portrayed through his Diary: Growing Up in North Andover 1874-1892 and is set to music by William Thomas McKinley
