Introduction

I have a deep admiration for artists who seem inexhaustible in their creative energies, vision, and ambition. Stephanie Lamprea is such an artist.

The Colombian-American soprano is an architect of new sounds and expressions as a performer, recitalist, curator and improviser, specializing in contemporary classical repertoire. Trained as an operatic coloratura, Stephanie uses her voice as a mechanism of avant-garde performance art, creating “maniacal shifts of vocal production and character… like an icepick through the skull” (composer Jason Eckardt). Her work has been described as “mercurial” by I Care If You Listen, and she “sings so expressively and slowly with ever louder and higher-pitched voice, that the inclined listener [has] shivers down their back and tension flows into the last row." (Halberstadt.de) She received a 2019 Emerging Artist Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation, and she was awarded Second Prize in the international John Cage Awards, sponsored by the John Cage Orgel Stiftung in Halberstadt, Germany. Her curatorial work received a 2018 grant from the Puffin Foundation. Stephanie was a featured TEDx Speaker in TEDxWaltham: Going Places.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to and watch Stephanie in action here. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

See? Told you. Now imagine my delight when, at the beginning of the pandemic lock-down in the United States, Stephanie solicited composers to write brief unaccompanied pieces for her that she would record for a multi-volume set of self-produced albums. I jumped at the chance and, thankfully, she agreed to collaborate with me! My “tiny work” for her is my one-minute miniature Ich kreise um Gott.

Ich kreise um Gott

Ich kreise um Gott is a setting of the poem by Rainer Maria Rilke written in the style of early 20th-century atonal Expressionism. Rilke’s symbolism and dense imagery has long fascinated me, as has the music of the Second Viennese School composers. This piece provided me an opportunity for a deliberate Alban Berg homage/“throwback.”

The text I set is only the second stanza of a brief untitled poem from Rilke’s The Book of Hours (1905), reproduced here:

Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen,
die sich über die Dinge ziehn.
Ich werde den letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen,
aber versuchen will ich ihn.

Ich kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm,
und ich kreise jahrtausendelang;
und ich weiß noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm
oder ein großer Gesang.

In translation by the incomparable Stephen Mitchell:

I live my life in widening rings
which spread over earth and sky.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but that is what I will try.

I circle around God, the primordial tower,
and I circle ten thousand years long;
and I still don’t know if I’m a falcon, a storm,
or an unfinished song.

Here is how I set these words:

The opening presents a fairly obvious twelve-tone row, 6019T23E5478, with a brief (and textually appropriate) repetition of the series-concluding G/A-flat semitone around the word “circle.” Also, I could not resist the simple whole note text-painting for “lang” (predictable, but hey if it ain’t broke don’t fix it).

The piece’s second row form begins in the middle of the word “jahrtausendelang,” a retrograde-inversion transformation whose transposition level allowed me to exploit a C/F# tritone dyad to begin the second half of the composition/stanza, mirroring the opening interval of the song.

For the final row form, initiated by “ein Falke,” I was a little less literal with the ordering of the set and, at the end, even pitch content; pitch-class B is omitted entirely in favor of a quasi-tonal “reverse Picardy” cadence that would make Berg or Mahler proud. The climactic D/F# “großer” may be heard as an implied D-major arpeggiation which is immediately counteracted with a D-minor-implying D to F-natural on “Gesang.”

Drama and text illumination before dogma, my friends.

To listen to Ich kreise um Gott, go here. While you’re there, purchase the whole album for only $5 USD and enjoy works by Nicole DeMaio, Alex Eddington, Lesley Mok, Cecilia Muylaert, Edward Nesbit, Christopher Schlechte-Bond, Drew Swatosh, Héloïse Werner, and Ian Wiese.

Happening next…

This Friday November 20th, 2020 at 2:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, Stephanie Lamprea will conduct short interviews and perform tiny-works via a livestream show, featuring composers Erich Barganier, Nicole DeMaio, David Howell, Kim Osberg, Drew Swatosh, Ian Wiese, and myself.

There is a $10 entry fee.

RSVP here!

This is going to be such a great recital/show and I cannot wait for you all to watch it.

Issue No. 7: Collaboration with Stephanie Lamprea

Introduction

Ich kreise um Gott

Happening next…