“Three Silent Things” is the new album from Kansas-based composer Ingrid Stölzel.
The vocal chamber compositions feature poems from American aviator Amelia Earhart; Adelaide Crapsey, inventor of the American cinquain poem; Sara Teasdale, winter of the first Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Mohawk-Canadian poet Emily Pauline Johnson. All are set to music from Stölzel that is emotionally arresting and deeply evocative.
Released by the Navona label, the album is currently available on major digital musical platforms and may be purchased as a download.
A native of Germany, Stölzel, who currently serves as a professor of composition at the University of Kansas School of Music, has composed pieces that have been performed in venerated venues such as Carnegie Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, Kennedy Center, and the Seoul Arts Center.
She recently spoke about the process of composing the music heard on “Three Silent Things.”
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was the origin of this album?
I love writing vocal music. For many in the classical world, they think “singer and piano.” That is the norm and I grew up with these art songs. There’s lots of famous German composers who wrote Lieder cycles. But what I really love, too, is the voice with other instruments. That was kind of the impetus behind this. Also, I love reading poetry, and in this particular collection, I’m featuring all women poets, some very well-known like Sara Teasdale and then, others, since we’re in Kansas, not so well known for their poetry, like Amelia Earhart.
That was the overarching idea behind the album, and it was pieces that were commissioned throughout the years and now collected as a commercial release.
I’m not a native Kansan and maybe that’s why but I had no idea that she wrote poetry.
[Laughs.] Hence the accent, I’m also not a native Kansan. But when you live in Kansas and I’ve been in the Midwest for a long time, you sort of learn about the area, and Atchison, Kansas, is just 45 minutes from Lawrence, where I live. They have a little museum there of her birthplace but, also since then, there’s another huge museum that opened up there, the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum. The commission was really to write in honor of her and, like you, I did not know [that] she loved reading poetry and she loved writing poetry. That was just super exciting and her poem, which her title is “Courage,” I think is so contemporary even though it was written a hundred years ago.
As a matter of fact, all this poetry was written a hundred years ago, but it feels like there’s a contemporary essence in those poems. Then, me bringing music to it, just really allowed me to play with that. But it’s really fun living in Kansas, honoring her, and discovering her love of poetry.
You’re working with existing texts and then creating music for them. What is your process for bringing them together?
Usually what happens when I read a poem is that I have some sound world bubbling up. I live with the text for a long time before I write a single note. My goal as a composer when I’m writing and using other peoples’ words is just to elevate the emotional content that’s in the poem. My music is just there to support [the text]. Music is so amazing. It has the capability to induce in emotions in people and so together with words, I think it can be extra powerful.
For me, I always have the words first, and they’re the most important. And then I try to elevate what I can do in the music. Sometimes I discover poets like Adelaide Crapsey, who I’d never heard of. But I was researching short-form poems like haiku but not haiku. She had an extraordinary life, and she’d written so many of these five-line poems that were published posthumously. The structure of the poems and also the emotional content was the impetuous for me to write.
In my past life, I was also in bands and I wrote more popular music, sort of pop songs, there it was a lot more linked to me. I would write the words and then the music came at the same time. But in my classical world, the poems come first.
It occurs to me that when you’re dealing with poetry, you’re dealing with a form that’s most often metrical. Music is metrical. How do you deal with meter when you’re adapting a text and but aware that maybe the musical meter differs?
It’s so crucial to be aware of stress. In pop music we can get away with certain things because often there’s a very constant beat. I do a metrical analysis. That doesn’t mean that every word is set syllabically, but I have to make sure that, for the singer, it feels as natural as speaking. I feel that poems have to be read aloud. So, I do a careful setting. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be moments when I stretch a word. I also don’t shy away from what’s called text painting.
In one of the songs from “Three Silent Things,” I have the words “look up” starting the piece. I absolutely have the singer going above an octave. They have to sing a high leap, which is very difficult to control, and I wanted the audience to hear those words and maybe even have this lift as they’re hearing it. The song cycle starts with the word “listen,” and so I had this idea: When you have a conversation with someone and you say, “Hey, listen to me,” you kind of lean in. That piece starts more in a whispering way before the singer gets to have pitch. I’m hoping to draw the audience into the song with the word “listen.”
I love playing with text painting, and I think deeply about syllabic meter and metric stress so that it feels natural to a singer.
