COMMISSIONS

Inspired by the life of Joan Vox

Rachel DeVore Fogarty on “Untangled Threads”:

What is it about stories that speaks to the deepest recesses of our hearts?

Stories are how we make sense of our world.  We tell them to explain other people’s actions, our circumstances, or why we are who we are.  We tell them to connect to other people- to encourage, admonish, or make someone laugh. We tell them to ourselves even when they aren’t true; stories have an immense power over how we see ourselves, how we see other people and how we discern what is real or imagined.

Sometimes our stories are inherited, framing where we came from, why we are here, how we came to be. We pass them on to future generations as they were given to us. They, too, become pieces of us. 

I think our memory is often tied to the stories we tell ourselves.  Our interpretation of our memories becomes a story of what we love.  I think Kevin captures this in a profound way in his lyric “To love is to remember.”  To me, that is the heart of this work.  We are what we love- and memory is a sign of love’s endurance, a marker that perhaps love is in some way eternal. 

This work explores the connection between memory and love through words and music, spanning the life of one woman from child to matriarch.  Each movement is sung by Joan herself, at different ages and within different moments in time drawn from her engaging memoir. 

In this work, I specifically wanted to experiment with blending the dramatic storytelling of musical theatre with the harmonic language, form and various musical elements of art song and opera. The spoken monologues are drawn directly from the author’s words.

As a composer, I’m often inspired by the way stories distill the power of language, how words evoke vivid imagery, resonating with the complexities of the human condition.  I seek to put emotion into sound and to create art that resonates with the heart, ignites the imagination and hopefully, leaves a lasting impression on those who encounter it. 

Both Kevin and I would like to thank Joan Vos for entrusting us with her wonderful stories as well as Sylvia Stoner, Suna Gunther, Anne Jennifer Nash, Sharon Campbell and Young Kim (SALT) for commissioning and bringing this work to life.

Inspired by the life of Cassie Berdine Pierce

Forrest Pierce on “Cassie Leaves Nebraska”: 

The dust bowl years were ones of great hardship for people across the Great Plains. For my grandmother, in the still-wild Sand Hills of southern Nebraska, they were nearly unbearable. Her memoirs and farm journals tell, in curt language, of the grim statistics of those years of storm and cold, drought and illness. And yet, they also share deeply personal moments of great joy—the birth of her daughter, a particularly good applesauce cake, the arrival of her new piano.

Cassie's story, told in her own words, is not a one of epic heroism, of ordinary people overcoming incredible odds; rather, it's a story of the perfectly quotidian heroism of the women who kept the houses and farms of the prairies. Chickens and cows, laundry and shotguns, ice cutting and dish washing, marital discord—it was mostly just hard work. Then, when drought came, and winds blew, even the work wasn't quite enough. Hot wind, cold wind, burnt crops, hens too cold to lay.

My Grandmother, like many, fled west. This piece is dedicated to her memory, and the steely tenderness of her character. In my mind's eye, she is cutting grass with that old bent scythe, and whistling her favorite hymn.

This work was originally commissioned for the 175th anniversary of Westport, Missouri, and then re-commissioned by Sharon O’Connell Campbell, Suna Gunther, Young Kim, Anne Jennifer Nash, and Sylvia Stoner (SALT) in this rewritten, larger version.

Emily Feld on “We Are Keepers of the Stories”: 

The matriarchs in my life were always on the move, with their multitude of household tasks, wrangling kids, and often working jobs outside of the home on top of everything else. I wanted to reference this sense of constant activity through the piano accompaniment in this piece, especially. First we hear a rhythmic and energetic opening. We eventually settle into a calmer main theme, but there's still an undercurrent of perpetual motion. This perpetual motion could represent a woman's perseverance, a mother's boundless love, or could just as easily be simmering exhaustion and restlessness in the face of the monotony that can come with the routines and demands of running a home or managing a family. 

I also want to acknowledge that the phrase "we are keepers of the stories" was spoken by Rabbi Matt Cutler at the memorial service of Carol Bea White. This phrase inspired lyricist Sylvia Stoner-Hawkins to write this poignant text that I've so enjoyed working with. 

With source material by Jill Kandel, inspired by the lives of Sophia and Minnie

Emily Feld on “This Day Is Ending”: 

My goal with this slow second movement was to stay as straightforward and elegant as possible, like a folk song, and then to layer on harmonies to create a dramatic build. I love how the text could be interpreted in different ways – this person could simply be finding comfort in memories from the past while still participating fully in the present, or they could be stuck in that past to the point where it's preventing them from taking a hard but necessary step forward in life. The text reminded me of the many North Dakota sunsets I saw as a college student in the Red River Valley, and I drew inspiration from those moments as I wrote this piece.

Emily Feld on “Common Place”: 

I returned to the idea of perpetual motion, using a repetitive, rippling eighth-note pattern in the piano accompaniment as the foundation for this final movement as a way to tie this set of pieces together. It was important to me that this set of three short pieces each sounded unique and could potentially be performed as stand-alone works, while still being grounded in sounds and ideas that complement each other when performed as a set.