Annual List of Works : American Music Center
 ~3M |
Composer
Stacy Garrop (born 5 December 1969, Columbus OH, United States)
811 Washington Street #2 Evanston IL 60202 USA
Title
Sonnets of Desire, Longing, and Whimsy
Genre
Choral, secular (Text: English, poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay)
Instrumentation
SATB unaccompanied
Year of composition
2004
Duration
8’00”
Place of premiere performance
St. Mark's Episcopal Church
City: Berkeley CA
Date of premiere performance
20 November 2005
Performers
Volti, conducted by Robert Geary
Score Publisher: Inkjar Publishing Company 811 Washington Street #2 Evanston IL 60202 USA
URL: www.garrop.com
E-mail: mail@garrop.com
Edition-No.: N.A.
Price: $5.00 USD
Recording
Record company: unreleased commercially
Programme note
"Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was an American poet who produced a great body of work in her lifetime. Among her works are several books of poetry, essays, plays, an opera libretto, and over two hundred sonnets. The topics of her sonnets range from love to politics to the fate of mankind. Beautifully constructed, I find that many of Millay's sonnets are well suited to be set to music. I am currently in the middle of composing a choral cycle of Millay's sonnets; when complete, the cycle will contain approximately twenty three sonnets grouped into nine sets. Sonnets of Desire, Longing, and Whimsy is the fourth set. It takes a look at love from three aspects: unreasonable desire, inconsolable longing, and shallow, whimsical romance."
- Stacy Garrop
The following additional commentary about the work appeared in a review of the premiere performance written by Heuwell Tircuit, and published in the San Francisco Classical Voice.org on November 21, 2005
Garrop, who currently lives and teaches in Chicago, set three poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, which made for an interesting set of contrasting views of love. The first, "Now by this moon," deals with a woman's longing for a man she can not attain. Next was an elegy for a dead lover, "Time does not bring relief." Her finale dealt with a sarcastically indifferent attitude toward love, "I shall forget you presently, my dear." Garrop employed little color tricks within her textures to highlight emotional elements, such as breathing sounds and moans of longing for the "moon" piece. By contrast, short staccato sounds were used for the pessimistic lover: "I would indeed that love were longer-lived; And oaths were not so brittle as they are..." (The cycle was commissioned for Volti by Chuck and Joan Grant, and money well spent it was.)
Composer Biography
Stacy Garrop has received several awards and grants including the 2006/2007 Detroit Symphony Orchestra's Elaine Lebenbom Memorial Award, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble's 2006/2007 Harvey Gaul Composition Competition, the 2005 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Music Composition Prize, 2005 and 2001 Barlow Endowment commissions, Chicago Symphony Orchestra's 1999-2000 First Hearing Composition Competition, Omaha Symphony Guild's 2000 International New Music Competition, and the New England Philharmonic's 2000 Call for Scores Competition. She was selected to participate in reading session programs sponsored by the American Composers Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, and the Dale Warland Singers.
Her works have been performed by the ensembles Ambassador Duo, Artaria String Quartet, Biava Quartet, Callisto Ensemble, EARPLAY, Empyrean Ensemble, Enso Quartet, Helikon Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Lincoln Trio, New EAR, Orion Ensemble, Seattle New Music Ensemble, Society for New Music, and Third Angle; by Chicago A Cappella, Murray State University Concert Choir, Peninsula Women's Chorus, Princeton Singers, Volti, and Vox Caelestis; and by the Amarillo Symphony, Charleston Symphony Orchestra, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Erato Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Ilinois Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Youth Orchestra, National Repertory Orchestra, New England Philharmonic, Omaha Symphony, Santa Cruz Symphony, and the Women's Philharmonic. Her works have been choreographed by the a-ha! Dance Theatre of Kansas City, and conducted by Martín Benvenuto, Cliff Colnot, Karen Lynne Deal, Apo Hsu, Paul Hostetter, Donald Portnoy, Jeffrey Renshaw, Steven Sametz, James Setapen, Stephen Squires, and Victor Yampolsky.
Dr. Garrop was composer-in-residence of Chicago's Music in the Loft chamber music series in 2004/05 and 2006/07. She has attended residences at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Aspen Music Festival, Banff Centre for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony, Oxford Summer Institute, Ragdale Colony, Round Top Music Festival, Wellesley Composers Conference, and Yaddo Colony. Theodore Presser Company and Hildegard Publishing Company publish several of her works.
Dr. Garrop was guest composer and speaker at the Texas Association for Symphony Orchestras conference in Amarillo, Texas in 2004. She has guest lectured at the University of Chicago, University of Missouri at Kansas City, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, University of South Carolina at Columbia, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Amarillo College, and West Texas A&M University.
She earned degrees in music composition at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor (B.M.), the University of Chicago (M.A.), and Indiana University - Bloomington (D.M.). Dr. Garrop is an Associate Professor in Composition at the Chicago College of Performing Arts of Roosevelt University.
Stacy Garrop's music is published by the Theodore Presser Company and Inkjar Publishing Company (ASCAP). For more information, visit: www.garrop.com/.