Solace: an Emily Brontë Song Cycle (2019-2020)

Instrumentation: solo mezzo-soprano, piano

Performance duration: ~8:00

Divided into three movements:

I. Long neglect has worn away

II. Stanzas

III. The night is darkening around me

About the Piece

This song cycle made me fall in love with writing solo repertoire and with the process of writing larger works. This was the first compiled set of pieces I ever wrote that made it to completion, and it also holds significance to me on my journey to becoming a composition major at St. Olaf. This song cycle also was selected to be a part of the 2022 Source Song Festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

I wrote the final movement, "The night is darkening around me", first, during the first semester of my freshman year. At the time, I was not a declared music major yet, but I had wanted to be very badly since I couldn't take any music courses without being a major. I didn't know exactly how the process of entering the composition major worked at the time and I initially didn't see any completed composition requirement, so, just in case, I wanted to write something to show faculty that was recent and that I was proud of. After making it into the BA composition major (yay!), I then decided to turn "The night is darkening around me" into a song cycle rather than a standalone piece.

Forming the storyline of Solace from independent poems ended up being the most difficult, but most rewarding part of the compositional process of the cycle. To do this, I spent hours pouring over poetry collections, looking for poetry to accompany "Spellbound", which is the text for the movement "The night is darkening around me", in a cycle and ordering and comparing them by taking screenshots of the poems off the Internet and arranging them in windows next to each other on my desktop (really professional, I know). Eventually, I landed on two other Emily Brontë poems and a piece order – first, "Long neglect has worn away", then "Stanzas", then "Spellbound", and wrote those two pieces for my Composition I class.

The poem "Long neglect has worn away" speaks of remembering someone who is no longer the same as they once were or no longer alive. My personal favorite lines of the poem are "But that lock of silky hair / Still beneath that picture twined, / Tells us once those features were, / Paints their image on the mind", which, to me, reflect the joy that person brought to Emily. I alternate between major and minor tonal spaces throughout the piece to emphasize the happy and sad moments Emily must have felt when remembering this person.

"Stanzas" was the final movement that I wrote, but is the second movement of the piece. The poem itself speaks of the suffering one endures watching someone they love and care about die before their eyes. I related to and was moved by the pain, exhaustion, and anger Emily expressed in the lines of the poem, and it made the most sense to me to set the text in a more post-tonal space rather than a conventionally tonal and harmonious style. It was also the first post-tonal work I ever wrote, and, to my surprise, I really enjoyed writing in that style.

"The night is darkening around me" is the most hopeful movement of the cycle. The poem speaks of all the terrible and frightening things occurring around Emily that she can see, and initially she feels like she can't get away from them, repeating "and I cannot, cannot go" at the end of the first stanza. That line repeats at the end of the second stanza, but slightly different: "and yet I cannot go". But the beautiful final line of the poem in the last stanza, while containing similar words, has a completely different tone: she says "I will not, cannot go". I read that as courage Emily gains, and that there is something in this world that she has found that is worthy to fight for.