From the Cosmos to the Soul: A Celebration of Women’s Music
Join Illuminate Women’s Music for an evening of music written by women composers for solo soprano and solo piano performed by Rose Hegele and Julia Scott Carey
Illuminate Women’s Music Presents:
From the Cosmos to the Soul: A Celebration of Women’s Music
May 19, 2021 - 2:30 PM EDT, 7:30 PM BST
Rose Hegele, soprano; Julia Scott Carey, pianist
“Light” from Creation Oratorio by Sabrina Peña Young
An Alaskan Trilogy by Anne Phillips
- Why Faith Abides
- Romancing Ketchikan
- An Enduring Imbalance
Winter Song by Mari Kotskyy* (for solo piano)
Ololyga (2017) by Kamala Sankaram
“Tattoo” from Interior Designs (2013) by Svjetlana Bukvich - originally commissioned by Carolyn Dorfman Dance
Six Songs on Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay by Margaret Bonds
- Women Have Loved Before As I Love Now
- Feast
- What Lips My Lips Have Kissed
Song of the Bell (2021)* by Sungji Hong (for solo piano)
The Window (2020) by Niloufar Nourbakhsh
The House (2019) by Mason Bynes
Time to Reflect (2015) by Beata Moon
*World Premiere
The concert is supported by a seed grant from New York Women Composers, Inc. and features 5 works by NWYC members: Sabrina Peña Young, Anne Phillips, Svjetlana Bukvich, Niloufar Nourbakhsh and Beata Moon.
Canadian soprano Rose Hegele facilitates rigorous performance experiences that explore the extremes of human vocal expression in 20th and 21st century art music. She has been lauded for her ease with extended vocal techniques, creating “siren-like sounds that explored extremes of the vocal range” (The Boston Music Intelligencer). Specializing in contemporary opera, chamber music, and improvisation, Ms. Hegele sings to create a space to heal souls and bodies, and to allow humans to embrace all of their complexity and humanity. Highlights include world premiering the roles of “Venus,” “Doctor” and “First Lady” in Andy Vores’s Chrononhotonthologos with Guerilla Opera in 2017; leading ensemble performances in Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire at Clark University in February 2020; and collaborating with the Berklee College of Music’s Neither/Nor Composers’ Ensemble to perform improvisatory works by George Lewis, Iancu Dumitrescu, Richard Carrick, and Berklee’s student composers.
Ms. Hegele was awarded a Post-Master’s Degree Fellowship from the Berklee College of Music in 2019. She holds a Master’s Degree in Contemporary Classical Music from the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and a Bachelor of Music Degree in Vocal Performance and Musical Arts from the Eastman School of Music.
Julia Scott Carey is the Minister of Music at the Central Square Congregational Church in Bridgewater, where she leads the adult and children’s choirs from the keyboard. She is one of the accompanists for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the Boston Symphony Children’s Choir. She also serves as the accompanist for the Metropolitan Chorale, the Dedham Choral Society, the Boston College University Chorale, and the Boston Saengerfest Men’s Chorus. Julia teaches musicianship and serves as department coordinator at the Suzuki School in Newton. She is also a founder and core ensemble member of Juventas New Music Ensemble.
As a composer, her orchestral works have been performed by numerous orchestras, including the Boston Symphony and the Boston Pops, and have been broadcast on national TV and radio in the U.S. and in Russia. She was the youngest composer ever published by the Theodore Presser Company. She was also chosen to arrange a folk song for Yo-Yo Ma and Lynn Chang to play at Deval Patrick's inaugural ball.
Julia Scott Carey received a master’s degree in composition from the Harvard-New England Conservatory joint degree program, as well as a master’s degree in collaborative piano from Boston University.
Illuminate Women’s Music is a project to promote the work of emerging women composers and performers. It also gives a platform for historical repertoire by women composers to sit alongside new works. The project has been set up by Dr Angela Elizabeth Slater in 2017, a freelance composer who is a strong advocate of the promotion of women’s music both past and present. The project continues with the support of fellow composers Blair Boyd and Sarah Westwood.
New York Women Composers, Inc. was founded by composers Elizabeth Bell, Lucy Coolidge, Ann Callaway, and Robert Friou, Esq., in 1984. It is a New York 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, under the direction of its members. Membership is open to residents of New York State and the greater New York City metropolitan region who are women composers of serious concert music and to those in musical occupations who support the recognition of women composers.
Program Notes and Texts:
“Light” from Creation Oratorio
Music and Lyrics by Sabrina Peña Young
Program Note:
A complex multilingual intertwining of Afro-Cuban music and traditional choral music, the intermedia oratorio Creation celebrates diversity and the beauty of procreation. A celebration of culture, life, humanity, and the female body, Creation further marks itself as a musical milestone, commissioned specifically for a 60 member woman's chorus and composed by a young female composer of Cuban-Dominican heritage. The work was commissioned by Millikin University’s and premiered by the Millikin University Women's Choir and the Millikin Percussion Ensembles. Originally written for chorus, this specific setting of “Light” is an arrangement for solo voice and electronics. -- Sabrina Peña Young
Text:
The Bright and Morning Star Earth in darkness The universe in quiet slumber
The infinite magnificence of the sun The Passion of Creation is here
And then God said, “Let there be light! Oh, radiant light!” Lord, the darkness is as light to you Light as bright as you
I awake and I am with You Dawn is here
An Alaskan Trilogy:
- “Why Faith Abides”
- “Romancing Ketchikan”
- “An Enduring Imbalance”
Program Note:
“For over 20 years, I have led a two-week vocal jazz workshop in Ketchikan, Alaska. It is a very artistic community. One year, during a monthly community entertainment gathering, Phoebe Newman read her poem, “Romancing Ketchikan.” It so captured Ketchikan’s 40 degree, rainy beauty. I was taken and set it for choir to sing the next year. The year after that, I set another one of Phoebe’s poems, then another… and it became “An Alaskan Trilogy.” I realized that it could be a solo piece as well. I still haven’t heard the choral setting by any other than my Ketchikan choir.” -- Anne Phillips
The cycle celebrates Ketchikan’s unique natural beauty. In “Why Faith Abides”, an ode to twilight, Phillips highlights the awe and sacred presence of Newman’s text in the piano part through delicate ostinatos and bell-like octaves, contrasted with flowing arpeggios and warm chordal articulations. “Romancing Ketchikan” describes the joy of rainfall through a gentle, arpeggiated motive in the piano’s left hand, occasional sparkling descending 5th raindrops in the pianist’s right hand, and lyrical vocal melodies. “An Enduring Imbalance” juxtaposes a chromatic ostinato with luscious seventh chord harmonies, and employs the pianist as a storyteller (short cluster chords represent the “great bears stumbling towards familiar streams”). All throughout the cycle, the voice’s lyrical melodies are set primarily in the middle register to allow the audience to hear the text clearly and envision Ketchikan vividly. -- Rose Hegele
Texts:
WHY FAITH ABIDES
Phoebe Newman
Every evening this world is reborn
Not in the quick glare of morning
Rising as we might, with dread or boredom
But folding softly into itself
The purple sea and pushing cloudbanks
The quiet small frogs dangling in their ponds
And the fluting songs of eagles
In the calm sweet twilight
Deer swim to other islands
The clicking ravens rise and settle in the cedars
And great blue herons
Awkwardly tuck their brittle legs
To lift their impossible lightness away from shore
There are reflections moving in the water
And in the sky, scarlet lights and green
It is in the surety of memory that we know these things
The slipping mists will fall
And the grey mountains curve into the clasp of night
The world in its every cell will be re-created
Then opened to us, gently glowing
Then somehow, both familiar
And entirely new.
ROMANCING KETCHIKAN
Phoebe Newman
A pendant of rain
Swings across the narrows
Collides softly with the mountains
Almost merging
Then separates, swings back again
Uninterrupted
A pendulum of sleep
Sliding from one density of dampness
Into another
The water mirroring the mist
I am cradled in a yellow kayak,
Dipping the paddle, pulling against the current
All memory of the word dry
Dissolving
I have left the high desert, the relentless sun and blue
Wanting to extend paradise
To cup dampness in my palms
Now, on moss
I sleep, open to the wetness
My dreams of chaos dwindling
I am dripping, dozing, calm, lulled
Turning as slowly as the moon, the tide
My breath grows deeper, quieter
And I am hushed, willing to descend
To sink deeper and deeper
Totally seduced
By this constant narcotic rain.
AN ENDURING IMBALANCE
Phoebe Newman
Growing old, with memory hard to come by,
I walk the shore more often,
searching, and thankful to see again
the perfect blue-ringed whelks
and the bluer inner shells of mussels.
Again the starfish, plump and brilliant,
inching up the jagged rocks
from warm to warmer, the green sea swelling,
and above, the slow April circling of eagles.
The herring return and the salmon,
and the great bears, I know, will wake
and stumble toward familiar streams,
shaking loose damp clods of earth.
Water falls steadily all around me,
rises, and falls again,
and I hold to this place
as if I were young
and still not convinced
of this stubborn, good world,
even as I touch with my curious hands
its smallest, most glorious shapes.
“Ololyga”
Music by Kamala Sankaram
Ololyga is inspired by Ann Carson’s essay “The Gender of Sound.” In Ancient Greek, ololyga is the ritual shriek of women, a sound so alarming to men that it could not be uttered within their earshot. Premiered in 2017 at Resonant Bodies Festival (and largely created while in residence with RBF at Mt. Tremper Arts), the piece is a direct response to the 2016 election and the historic silencing of women. It traces the evolution of a voice from non-pitched extended techniques to the high extremes of the female vocal range. -- Kamala Sankaram
“Tattoo” 4.30
from the suite Interior Designs
Music and Lyrics by Svjetlana Bukvich
Program Notes
Tattoo from Interior Designs was a commission Bukvich received from Carolyn Dorfman Dance for the company's "Celebrate 30! Performance Gala" in spring 2013. The 30-minute piece features electro-acoustic music with live vocalists, integrated lighting and projected images on-screen, theater walls and dancers' bodies via video mapping. In the piece, the entire theater becomes an immersive environment that reveals the internal and external worlds of both performer and spectator. Listed as one of the top ten dance events of 2013 (The Star-Ledger), Interior Designs has received the New Music USA, 2013 Live Music for Dance award, the USArtists International grant, and support from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Bukvich: "When I worked with Carolyn on Interior Designs, I realized there is something very wise about her, and I began to think I understood the themes in her work. The material went back and forth between the videographer, choreographer and me. I spent time in the company's community, watching the dancers to get a sense of who they are as people and to understand the movements." -- Svjetlana Bukvich
Lyrics:
For several reasons, I
I love you so
Reasons, I
If I can not love you I can not live
For reasons I can not explain
If you come closer
And look within, I
I love you so
Reasons, I
Six Songs on Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay
- “Women Have Loved Before as I Love Now”
- “Feast”
- What Lips My Lips Have Kissed”
Program Note:
Margaret Bonds’s Six Songs on Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay are unapologetically feminist, deliciously chromatic, and showcase Bonds’s unique compositional voice and her sensitivity to text setting. While these settings are presented as one cycle by Hildegard Publishing Company, Bonds wrote four songs (two of which include “Feast” and “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed”) as a cycle, and composed “Women Have Loved Before as I Love Now” and “Hyacinth” independently.
“Women Have Loved Before as I Love Now” was published by Bonds in 1930, and “is a forceful affirmation of women’s right to choose their own loves – and to love assertively, boldly, passionately.” Bonds underscores the text with wide-ranging triplet arpeggios in the piano, often featuring major chords immediately juxtaposed with their common-tone chromatic counterparts. Towards the end of the piece, the pianist’s arpeggios cease and are replaced with block chords, reminiscent of a recitativo secco. The voice’s rhythms increase in speed and register, and further emphasize the speaker’s passion, rebellion against patriarchal norms, and unapologetic nature.
“Feast”, composed in 1965, encapsulates an insatiable desire that the speaker does not want to be quenched. To set the mood, Bonds gives the pianist an octatonic melody in 3/4 over a bass ostinato before the singer enters, creating harmonic ambiguity. Throughout the work, the piano’s textures thicken and the vocal range moves upwards before the final climax when the voice sings “I” on a high B (followed by “will lie down lean with my thirst and my hunger”). Upon this release, the textures thin, the tempo slows, and the piece ends on an unresolved dissonance, perfectly capturing the speaker’s “desire for desire.”
“What Lips My Lips Have Kissed”, also composed in 1965, reminisces on lost loves of long ago. Bonds beautifully captures melancholy and longing through a recurring rhythmic piano motive (later transformed through use of polyrhythm), her use of suspensions to create harmonic uncertainty, and word-painting-- such as the choice to put “cry” on a high G-sharp. Significantly, this is the only known song of Bonds to employ an irregular meter: a 5/4 in measure 17 to maintain consistency of syllabic text setting. -- Rose Hegele
Texts:
WOMEN HAVE LOVED BEFORE AS I LOVE NOW
Edna St. Vincent MIllay
Women have loved before as I love now;
At least, in lively chronicles of the past--
Of Irish waters by a Cornish prow
Or Trojan waters by a Spartan mast
Much to their cost invaded—here and there,
Hunting the amorous line, skimming the rest,
I find some woman bearing as I bear
Love like a burning city in the breast.
I think however that of all alive
I only in such utter, ancient way
Do suffer love; in me alone survive
The unregenerate passions of a day
When treacherous queens, with death upon the tread,
Heedless and wilful, took their knights to bed.
FEAST
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I drank at every vine.
The last was like the first.
I came upon no wine
So wonderful as thirst.
I gnawed at every root.
I ate of every plant.
I came upon no fruit
So wonderful as want.
Feed the grape and bean
To the vintner and monger:
I will lie down lean
With my thirst and my hunger
WHAT LIPS MY LIPS HAVE KISSED, AND WHERE, AND WHY
Edna St. Vincent Millay
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
“The Window”
Music by Niloufar Nourbakhsh and Poetry by Forugh Farrokhzad
Program Note:
The text I have used for this piece is an excerpt from a longer poem by Forugh Farrokhzad. I see this poem as a reminder to all of us that we all have a window within ourselves to surpass time, surpass injustices, and to achieve freedom. And in order to open this window within us, we can do nothing but deliriously love.- -- Niloufar Nourbakhsh
Lyrics:
When my trust hung from the feeble rope of justice
and the whole city tore my lamps’ hearts to shreds,
when love’s innocent eyes were bound
by the dark kerchief of law, and blood gushed
from my dreams’ unglued temples,
when my life was no longer anything,
nothing at all except the tick tock of a clock on the wall,
I understood that I must, must, must
deliriously love.
“The House”
Music by Mason Bynes and Poetry by Gertrude Stein
Program Note:
A first love is one of beauty, delight and discovery. Gertrude Stein’s poetry captures the buzzing anxiousness of a first love, with repetitive tones of endearment and sweet nothings. The youthfulness of this poem resonated with me and my first experience of loving someone. To capture this, I recalled my experience as a vocalist, singing Aaron Copland’s “Laurie’s Song” from The Tender Land as inspiration. Laurie sings of her growth in an anxious way, but has a moment of clarity and centeredness towards the end of the piece. Drawing from that sense of lyricism, I used twinkling tremolos in the piano and wandering tonal centers in the accompaniment to support the narrative [like the word “twinkling], but also as a metaphor for the moments of love that are arresting. This piece was written to express the journey of companionship, with music that is capturing in the way a lover captures your heart. -- Mason Bynes
Lyrics:
[The House Was Just Twinkling In The Moon Light]
The house was just twinkling in the moon light,
And inside it twinkling with delight,
Is my baby bright.
Twinkling with delight in the house twinkling
with the moonlight,
Bless my baby bless my baby bright,
Bless my baby twinkling with delight,
In the house twinkling in the moon light,
Her hubby dear loves to cheer when he thinks
and he always thinks when he knows and he always
knows that his blessed baby wifey is all here and he
is all hers, and sticks to her like burrs, blessed baby
“Time to Reflect”
Music by Beata Moon and Poetry by Claire Lind (Mutti)
Program Note:
“Time to Reflect” was written in honor of my husband’s grandmother, Claire Lind or “Mutti” as our family lovingly called her. She was a vibrant, creative individual who loved to sing and play the piano. Mutti generously shared with us many of the stories of her long life, not least those dealing with her escape from the Holocaust. She also enjoyed writing, and this song is my setting of one of her poems that I wrote in memory of her. Mutti was a warm and loving person who welcomed me into the family and always made me feel special. We miss you and think of you often, Mutti. -- Beata Moon
Text:
"To Myself" by Claire Lind
It's time to reflect,
To be myself,
To control and to master
Not be placed on a shelf
Many stages I passed,
A child;
A young woman;
And in time -- a wife.
I felt sorrow and pain,
We often must face,
In our human race.
The seeds I have planted,
My children were granted,
Hoping, when they float
in life's stream,
With improvement enchanted.
I now have the time,
For control of myself,
Never to be placed,
On a lonely shelf.
Acknowledgements
My warmest thanks to:
- Dr. Angela Slater for inviting me to be on Illuminate Women’s Music 2020-2021 digital concert series. It has been such a joy, and you have been an incredible facilitator!
- New York Women Composers, Inc., Marilyn Bliss, and Rain Worthington for awarding me a seed grant in support of this concert, and for all of your support throughout this process.
- Julia Carey for your fantastic musicianship, thoughtfulness and kindness as a collaborator.
- Sabrina Peña Young, Anne Phillips, Mari Kotskyy, Kamala Sankaram, Svjetlana Bukvich, Margaret Bonds, Sungji Hong, Niloufar Nourbakhsh, Mason Bynes and Beata Moon for your incredible compositions and generosity throughout this process! It has been an honour to sing and play your works.
- Paul Holmes for your enthusiasm, patience, and willingness to solve all technical issues in this complex performance!
- Eunbi Kim for your support and encouragement in every stage of this process.
- Kathryn Wright for your unparalleled vocal knowledge, for continuing to refine my technique, and for your interpretive suggestions on Margaret Bonds’s songs.
- Phoebe Newman, Sabrina Peña Young, Svjetlana Bukvich, Forugh Farrokhzad, Gertrude Stein, Claire Lind (Mutti), Edna St. Vincent Millay for your powerful poetry.
Canadian soprano Rose Hegele facilitates rigorous performance experiences that explore the extremes of human vocal expression in 20th and 21st century art music. She has been lauded for her ease with extended vocal techniques, creating “siren-like sounds that explored extremes of the vocal range” (The Boston Music Intelligencer). Specializing in contemporary opera, chamber music, and improvisation, Ms. Hegele sings to create a space to heal souls and bodies, and to allow humans to embrace all of their complexity and humanity. Highlights include world premiering the roles of “Venus,” “Doctor” and “First Lady” in Andy Vores’s Chrononhotonthologos with Guerilla Opera in 2017; leading ensemble performances in Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Kian Khalilian’s خورشید طلوع تماشای به... be tamásháye tolúe khorsheed... to watch the sun rise... (In Memory of Abbás Kiárostamí) at Clark University in February 2020; and collaborating with the Berklee College of Music’s Neither/Nor Composers’ Ensemble to perform improvisatory works by George Lewis, Iancu Dumitrescu, Richard Carrick, and Berklee’s student composers.
Ms. Hegele was awarded a Post-Master’s Degree Fellowship from the Berklee College of Music in 2019. She holds a Master’s Degree in Contemporary Classical Music from the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and a Bachelor of Music Degree in Vocal Performance and Musical Arts from the Eastman School of Music.
Julia Scott Carey is the Minister of Music at the Central Square Congregational Church in Bridgewater, where she leads the adult and children’s choirs from the keyboard. She is one of the accompanists for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the Boston Symphony Children’s Choir. She also serves as the accompanist for the Metropolitan Chorale, the Dedham Choral Society, the Boston College University Chorale, and the Boston Saengerfest Men’s Chorus. Julia teaches musicianship and serves as department coordinator at the Suzuki School in Newton. She is also a founder and core ensemble member of Juventas New Music Ensemble.
As a composer, her orchestral works have been performed by numerous orchestras, including the Boston Symphony and the Boston Pops, and have been broadcast on national TV and radio in the U.S. and in Russia. She was the youngest composer ever published by the Theodore Presser Company. She was also chosen to arrange a folk song for Yo-Yo Ma and Lynn Chang to play at Deval Patrick's inaugural ball.
Julia Scott Carey received a master’s degree in composition from the Harvard-New England Conservatory joint degree program, as well as a master’s degree in collaborative piano from Boston University.
