Program Note
Shulamit Ran, a native of Israel, began setting Hebrew poetry to music at the age of seven. By nine she was studying composition and piano with some of Israel’s most noted musicians, and within a few years she was having her works performed by professional musicians and orchestras. As the recipient of scholarships from both the Mannes College of Music in New York and the America Israel Cultural Foundation, Ran continued her composition studies in the United States with Norman Dello-Joio. In 1973, she joined the faculty of University of Chicago, where she is now the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music. She lists her late colleague and friend Ralph Shapey, with whom she also studied in 1977, as an important mentor.
In addition to receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1991, Ran has been awarded most major honors given to composers in the U.S., including two fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her music has been played by leading performing organizations including the Chicago Symphony under both Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez, the Cleveland Orchestra under Christoph Von Dohnanyi in two U.S. tours, the Israel Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta and Gustavo Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic, and the American Composers Orchestra. Between 1990 and 1997 she was Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, having been appointed for that position by Maestro Daniel Barenboim as part of the Meet The Composer Orchestra Residencies Program.
The composer offers the following note about tonight’s piece:
In 1979 I was commissioned by WFMT, Chicago’s Fine Arts Radio Station, to write a song cycle for inclusion in a nine-part radio series examining the 20th century art song. It was my initial intention to group together a number of poems, when I came across “Apprehensions” by Sylvia Plath. Written in the last year of her life, it is the first poem in the Winter Trees collection. What immediately struck me upon reading it was what I perceived of as the musical suggestiveness of the poem’s central idea and formal plan: in four stanzas, the colors white, gray, red and black are used as a metaphor for the metamorphosis of a state of mind. Each stanza is rich with powerful imagery, ranging from the eerie to the intensely violent.More than an opportunity to paint color in sound -- an attractive, but, in and by itself, not exactly an original impulse -- the poem’s format hinted at the possibility of great contrast between movements, held together and propelled forward by one central idea. The overall shape of a gradual ascent to a horrific climax culminating in a steep fall was one I found myself drawn to enormously, leading me to treat the work as a kind of a “mini-opera”, consisting of three “acts”, or movements, followed by an “aftermath”, or an epilogue. Toward that end I added a clarinet (to me an instrument which can be closely linked to the human voice), as a kind of “alter ego”, to the more conventional pairing of voice and piano.My increased concern at the time of composing “Apprehensions” for the control of thematic transformation, coupled with contrapuntal thinking, allowed me a greater economy in the use of compositional materials and a new freedom of expression.
Shulamit Ran was Composer in Residence at Yellow Barn in 2000 and 2007.