Composer elevates voices of women poets on new recording

LAWRENCE — What intrigues concertgoers most when they hear Ingrid Stölzel’s composition “Livid Loneliness of Fear,” a setting of poetry by aviator Amelia Earhart, is the droning sound of a propeller airplane that opens the piece.

So that is how her new album, “Three Silent Things: Vocal Chamber Music by Ingrid Stölzel” (Navona Records), starts as well.

“The sound is created by the percussionist, Garret Arney, rubbing a bass drum with a super ball attached to a mallet, and it makes this distant propeller airplane sound,” said Stölzel, associate professor in the University of Kansas School of Music. “The idea was to create an atmosphere before the voice comes in that honors Earhart’s pioneering legacy as an aviator. Her poem ‘Courage’ that I'm setting also paints a picture of flying ‘high above the clouds,’ so I wanted to have this kind of atmospheric moment.”

Taking its title from a line in Earhart’s poem, the 15-minute album opener “Livid Loneliness of Fear” features mezzo-soprano Annie Rosen, plus current and former KU faculty members Daniel Velasco (flute), Justin Harbaugh (clarinet), Véronique Mathieu (violin) and Hannah Collins (cello). 

“When I write vocal music, I have the added advantage of another artistic perspective, which is the poet,” Stölzel said. “The text is what will inspire the melodies and what's happening in the music. And my goal as a composer is to elevate the message that's already in the poem. I really feel my responsibility is to the poets. And I picked poets for this album — all women — whose powerful words I felt like I could do something with. Not every poem lends itself to a musical setting. But I chose poetry I felt like I could add something to musically and emotionally.”

As many audience members are, Stölzel said she was surprised to learn that Earhart wrote poetry.

“The piece was commissioned by the American Wild Ensemble,” she said. “They had a theme about American female aviators, and, of course, it was clear that I would pick the Kansan, Amelia Earhart. In my research, I learned she read a lot of poetry and then also wrote poetry. The poem ‘Courage’ was published right before her first transatlantic flight in 1928. I wrote the piece to honor her and her legacy.”

That is followed by a 10-song cycle titled “To One Beyond Seas” featuring soprano Sarah Tannehill Anderson, plus violin and piano (Ellen Sommer, KU faculty member). It sets to music a poem by Emily Pauline Johnson (1861-1913), who was a Canadian with Mohawk heritage.

“In her poem ‘Autumn’s Orchestra,’ each of the 10 stanzas had its own heading, so that's why I created a song cycle with each song capturing the unique aspects of every stanza,” Stölzel said. “The poem has an overarching nature theme as well as many musical references, even a reference to a Chopin prelude that I have fun with in the fourth song, ‘Mosses.’ Those musical references in the poem also became the reason I chose to have a violin in addition to piano. In the poem she talks about a distant violin, a rare violin, multiple times. So as people hear the word ‘violin,’ they also hear the timbre of the violin.”

The newest song cycle on the recording gives the album its title: “Three Silent Things.” It features Collins on cello and vocalist Rosen. It has seven movements and is roughly 10 minutes long. Stölzel said it was inspired by her discovery of the poetry of Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914).

“She died young, and ... she is the inventor of a unique American cinquain, a five-line poem with a very specific syllabic content. In a way, it’s kind of inspired by haiku. Crapsey’s cinquain poems are each composed of 22 syllables. These are distributed in a syllabic pattern consisting of two, four, six, eight and two, with an accentual stress pattern of one, two three, four and one for each of the five lines. Each poem is very poignant. I'm hoping that my song cycle draws attention again to her as a poet.”

The final, five-minute song titled “Silent Music of Infinity” sets to music a poem by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for poetry. It features Sommer and as well as KU faculty member Stella Markou (soprano).

“With this album, setting poetry by women was definitely a theme for me,” Stölzel said. “If I'm putting something out there into the world, I might as well also elevate other women. Another overarching theme of the poetry and my settings is time and silence. And I'm ending the release with the shortest song. The last line of Teasdale’s poem is ‘the silent music of infinity?’ and I ask the singer to turn away from the audience — or in this case the microphone — and sing this line into the piano, which activates the sympathetic vibrations of the strings in the piano. We are left with this last sound, which for me represents the silent music of infinity ... this last vibration.”