One thing I love about hanging out with people, especially people of varying ages, is that I get inspired! Because where do composers get ideas? Anywhere and everywhere they can! I’m always listening and looking. Inspiration can be found in raindrops, moss, leaves, squirrels, the way people move or look at each other when they talk, clouds, and spider webs….literally, anything. All of the sights, sounds and smells get entered into my brain, sorted out and filed for later when I’m sitting at the piano. Then the ideas come out through my voice singing or though my hands at the piano playing notes and chords. It’s ALL useful.
But sometimes the information can feel more like a direct download from my muse. Last year, when I was working on “Only the Few Brave Souls” – a new Art Song Cycle for Mezzo-Soprano and piano – I was at my daughter’s apartment. She loves music and has a very wide palette. She’s also incredibly thoughtful and always thinks ahead before we visit her to select a playlist she thinks her dad and I will love. She often include songs from decades past or new ones she thinks we should know about!
On this particular day she had some Kate Bush on that playlist! (Any other Kate Bush fans out there?) “Withering Heights” to be specific. I knew it immediately! I knew that this song would be the inspiration for the section of the new piece that had thus far eluded me. That section would be part of a setting of a radical text written my Mary Church Terrell.
Honestly, I was crazy to try to set it her essay. To begin with, it was prose, which is, at least for me, decidedly more difficult to set to music than poetry. To complicate matters, it had phrases like “unparalleled exhibition of lexicographical acrobatics” and “Nothing could be more unnatural than that a good woman should shirk her duty to the State.” But I was determined. I adored this text and for some reason I had faith that I could figure it out. After all, I had recently solved the puzzle of lining up her words into a second verse with almost exactly the same notes and rhythms as the first – a feat in and of itself.
I wasn’t sure what to do next. That was when Kate Bush came to the rescue. I shouted out at the time (much to the surprise of my husband and daughter), “That’s it! That’s the solution to third song!” But how was I so sure? I hadn’t heard how it would work. At that moment of realization, I still had no idea what the melody would be or how the text would fit. But somehow I knew that this Kate Bush song was the missing piece to the puzzle.
And I was right! It worked and beautifully. The radical writings of Mary Church Terrell fit neatly into a Kate Bush-style chord progression. Set mostly in the upper half of the treble clef (where Kate Bush hangs out), these powerful words would be easy to understand. The melody feels feminine: the pitches are high-ish and it’s pretty. Like “Withering Heights” it’s unassuming until you listen closely to the words. It was perfect! This was Mary Church Terrell – eloquent, smart as all get out, but her words….. well, let’s say that she didn’t mince them.
Check out the score here!
More blogs in this series:
They did what? Missing Stories of Powerful Women of the Suffrage Movement
Telling the Whole Story: Bold and Radical Lyrics
The Art Song Cycle “Only the Few Brave Souls,” was commissioned by Anna DeGraff and Gustavus Adolphus College with generous funding from the Ethel and Edgar Johnson Fund will be premiered on Nov. 20, 2021 at 7:00 pm, Bjorling Recital Hall, Gustavus Adolphus College,800 W College Ave, St Peter,Minnesota 56082