Some Favored Nook live recording in Putney (In front, left to right: Jessica Rivera, Andrew Garland, Molly Morkoski, Eric Nathan)

Composer Eric Nathan reflects on his September 2017 Artist Residency, Some Favored Nook, at Yellow Barn:

Soprano Jessica Rivera, baritone Andrew Garland, pianist Molly Morkoski and I recently completed an Artist Residency at Yellow Barn to workshop and record my new 45-minute dramatic cycle, “Some Favored Nook,” based on texts by Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, adapted by librettist Mark Campbell.

Yellow Barn afforded us an invaluable opportunity to have an intense period of uninterrupted time over the course of a few days to rehearse and workshop the piece, and then record it in front of a live audience as part of a private recording session at Executive Director Catherine Stephan’s house. While we were in-residence we also had wonderful opportunities to engage with students and faculty at the Greenwood School and with Yellow Barn supporters in the post-recording session Q&A. Both chances to engage with the community were especially valuable to me as a composer, because it allowed me to hear directly from the audiences how the music, performances and subject matter made them think and feel.

“Some Favored Nook” takes place in Civil War-era America and is inspired by the significant correspondence between an unlikely pair: Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Dickinson was practically unknown during her day but is now one of the world’s most widely read poets, and Higginson was a figure who loomed large in literary and political spheres of his time, but who is now relatively forgotten. My work focuses on Dickinson's private struggle as women poet in a patriarchal society and Higginson's public struggles for women’s rights, women poets, and the abolition of slavery. I place Dickinson and Higginson's writings in the context of the Civil War and society of the time, and uses the texts as a lens to view social, political and cultural issues of this early chapter in American history – civil rights, women's rights, the effects of war, as well as many of the themes that fill Dickinson's poetry, such as love and death – all issues that are as relevant today as they were in Dickinson’s time.

Dickinson and Higginson’s correspondence spanned twenty-four years and offers an intimate look into Dickinson’s private world as well as to Higginson’s involvement in major social and political issues of the day, as the commanding officer of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first black regiment in the Civil War. Higginson was also a noted supporter of women poets, and published the first collection of Dickinson’s poetry after her death. I set excerpts from Dickinson’s letters and poems she sent to Higginson, but as many of Higginson’s letters to her are lost, Higginson’s texts are set from his own essays as well as diaries from his “Army Life in a Black Regiment.”

This project has been a number of years in the making. It began as a proposal for my Rome Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2013-14. While I was in Rome, I assembled texts by Dickinson and Higginson. A subsequent visit to Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst sparked the initial measures of my piece, after I experienced the sense of space and light in Dickinson’s room. However, it was not until 2016 when the librettist Mark Campbell molded the texts into a compelling dramatic and thematic arc that ideas for my musical work began to fully take shape. I began composing in earnest in January 2017 during a residency at Copland House in Cortlandt Manor, where I lived and composed for three weeks in composer Aaron Copland’s home. It was incredibly humbling and inspiring to write music in Copland’s house, especially since his settings of Dickinson’s poetry in his “Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson” remain some of the most treasured and iconic musical settings of her poetry. I completed my work in July 2017, back at the American Academy in Rome as part of a Visiting Artist residency.  

For our residency at Yellow Barn, our goals were to workshop, rehearse and record “Some Favored Nook,” so that we could have documentation to entice presenters to sponsor the official world premiere and a subsequent multi-city tour in 2018-19 and/or 2019-20. Yellow Barn has been so supportive of this project and arranged for the work to be professionally video and audio recorded. The Brown Arts Initiative was also very helpful in making this workshop possible through a Research and Development Grant.

Our rehearsal process at Yellow Barn was incredibly collaborative. We experimented with various parameters of the text setting and performance techniques. For instance, during one rehearsal Molly Morkoski suggested we have Jessica Rivera sing a section of the music directly into the piano, to create an otherworldly resonance. I had marked this section “distantly” in the score, but this new technique brought out other aspects in the music that arose from our discussions of the dramatic unfolding of the work, and so we decided to keep this technique in the performance. It is at this moment that Dickinson sings her poem, “A Death blow is a Life blow to some,” to the tune of “America,” after Higginson has recited phrases from his diary recounting attending to wounded soldiers after a battle. Throughout the entire rehearsal process, we watched the characters of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson come to life, and how their conscious and unconscious emotional states could be translated from the score into dramatic performance.

The chances to engage with the Yellow Barn community were for me some of the most meaningful experiences of the week. The recording session took place in the intimate setting of a living room, and this intimacy combined with the inquisitiveness of the Yellow Barn audience fostered a remarkable discussion. Audience members shared how the performance and story affected them personally, and their questions and my colleagues’ responses helped me see our work in new light. Similarly, I was excited to hear the imaginative responses from students as they described the worlds and ideas that the musical motives conjured in their minds.

The entire week residency was a beautiful testament to the communicative power of music. We commune with music to share ideas and emotions and reflect on stories of the past and present. In such a divisive time, it was nourishing to be reminded of the unifying power of music, especially on such a small and personal scale, and how the exchange of ideas helps us see and understand our world.

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This project has been made possible, in part, by the Brown Arts Initiative.