“Lisette has left the plain. I have lost my joy.” For nearly 300 years, these words have traveled the world in various forms of early Haitian Creole, set to plaintive tunes and telling a story of longing for liberation deeply tied to Haitian history.
In the recent release of “Lisette: A Song’s Journey From Haiti & Back,” baritone Jean Bernard Cerin traces the evolution of “Lisette quitté la plaine,” the oldest surviving song in Haitian Creole. It dates to the 1750s.
“The album project has engaged the Cornell community and expands understanding of Haitian classical music, said Cerin, assistant professor of music in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). “I’m interested in the surprising ways in which Haitian music history intersects with larger global currents. That’s what we find with Lisette, that it shows up in a lot of different places: France, Louisiana.”
The album is the most recent contribution from the Lisette Project, which Cerin, its artistic director, founded in 2021 to bring performers, scholars and audiences together to explore Haitian classical music. Many of the album’s 19 musical and spoken word tracks were recorded at Cornell, and several instruments in the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards are heard on the album.
“My dream is for Cornell to become a leading institution on Haitian classical music,” Cerin said.
Cerin first encountered “Lisette quitté la plaine” in 2019 while curating a series about the music from Haiti and Louisiana, considering the migration of people from colonial Haiti to Louisiana. “This song embodies that movement,” he said.
The album presents six versions of the historic song interspersed with pieces from the broader Haitian musical tradition: hymn parodies, lyric pieces, Creole folk songs and Haitian salon works. These include: a piece for piano by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869), who came from a well-to-do Creole family in Louisiana with close ties to Saint-Domingue; “Dialogue d’amour,” a saucy 1920s Louisiana folk song arranged by African American composer and musicologist Maud Cuney Hare; and a 1930s setting of “Ava Maria” by Louis Borno, a Haitian politician and composer.
Cerin, a baritone, is joined by soprano Michele Kennedy, pianist Nicholas Mathew, an ensemble of instrumentalists and the voice of Haitian poet Lunise Jules.
“I want to widen people’s imagination of how old and how interconnected our culture in Haiti is with the United States and France in particular. In this album, you hear folk music, you hear art music. You hear piano music in styles that one recognizes but in a different language,” he said. “Some of those styles one recognizes are uniquely Haitian but you just didn’t know that’s what Haitian music sounded like.”
The album is also a historical project about Black liberation and about Haiti’s cultural and historical importance, Cerin said, including the Haitian Revolution leading up to independence in 1804.
Cerin performs two anthem parodies that make political statements. “Hymn Haytien,” sings the praises of Haitian Revolution leader Jean-Jaques Dessaline and parodies the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” “Oh Say, Do You Hear?” an American abolitionist song, sets biting words about the violence and injustice of slavery to the tune of the American national anthem.
“Considering not just Black music but Black music that’s looking toward freedom, looking toward Black agency, is a big thrust of the album,” Cerin said.
It culminates in “Lizèt fonn kite Laplenn,” a piece Cerin commissioned from Amos Coulanges, a leading Haitian composer writing for the guitar. Lyrics for the new song by Jules translate the story of “Lisette quitté la plaine” to 2025, when Haitians are still fleeing unrest in their country, and puts it in a context for today.
“The story is still true,” Cerin said. “The story still has a message for us today.”
The album is just the beginning for The Lisette Project and Cornell’s contributions to the study of Haitian classical music. In the coming year, Cerin will do research in Brooklyn with the estate of Haitian-American guitarist and composer Franz Casseus, who toured with Harry Belafonte but also made significant contributions to classical music.
And in spring 2026, Cerin was co-artistic director of the Sounding Kiskeya Music Festival and Symposium with Gabriela Gómez Estévez, assistant professor of music and director of orchestras (A&S) and scholar of Dominican music. “This event was tremendously popular with eight events that engaged hundreds of students, faculty, staff and community members about Haitian and Dominican music and culture,” Cerin said.
Cerin has also shared his historic explorations through teaching “Caribbean Folk Albums in the USA,” a spring 2025 course co-listed in music and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program.
Cornell undergraduate researchers have contributed website content, transcriptions and engraving and editing of musical scores to the Lisette Project,, work that started with summer research in 2024 through Cornell’s Nexus Scholars Program and continues today.
Lucas Mitchell ’27 joined the Lisette Project as a research assistant after learning about it from Cerin’s Caribbean Folk Albums course.
“I was really interested in the narrative the song told and how, in its later forms, one piece of music managed to convey insights and perspectives across the entire Atlantic Slave Trade – across years and miles,” he said.
Anthony Washington ’25, who was a summer 2024 research assistant and is now doing graduate studies in choral conducting at Yale University, said he still feels the impact of the project today. “Just a few weeks ago, I spoke to a Haitian-American musician at a peer institution who had no idea about Lisette,” he said. “Seeing the intrigue on her face and her sense of connection with her heritage was priceless.”
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