I'll travel to Chicago to work with the orchestra in January, and conduct their performance at the Illinois Music Education Association convention in Peoria on January 25.
Here are my notes accompanying the work:
For several years in the 1880’s Emily Dickinson exchanged
letters with a Mr. C.H. Clark, consoling one another over the untimely passing
of Clark’s brother, a friend of Dickinson’s. Her letters to him are filled with
beautiful courtesies and messages of exquisite comfort. One letter, dated January
18, 1885, ends with:
Have you blossoms and
books, those solaces of sorrow? That, I would also love to know, and receive
for yourself and your father the forgetless sympathy of
Your friend,
E. Dickinson.
Blossoms, books…. a modest collection of ordinary things to ease
healing. Even in encouraging Clark to indulge in these humble comforts,
Dickinson’s elegantly-expressed kindness is a balm for the soul. In this
spirit, this work for strings, Solaces,
is a collection of contrasting episodes meant to touch a range of emotions,
from trauma, to supplication, to joy, to peace.
Uniting these episodes is the collection of pitches {Bb-G-B-Eb},
which appear in various forms throughout the work. In German music notation, B
natural is “H” and B-flat is “B”, and E-flat is translated as the letter “S”
(pronounced “Es”). The pitches correspond to the initials BGHS, for Buffalo
Grove High School, the commissioning school for which these Solaces are dedicated in their time of
trials. This technique is found in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, who wove
his surname BACH {Bb-A-C-B} into The Art
of the Fugue, among other works, and also in the later works of Dmitri
Shostakovich, who used his initials DSCH {D-Eb-C-B}.
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