I Rise – choir & piano quintet edition

I Rise was commissioned by the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, Rune Bergmann, Music Director. Originally composed for choir with piano quintet, the piece was premiered in its orchestral version on October 1st, 2022 by the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and Calgary Philharmonic Chorus.

In August 2020, Evan Mounce approached me about working collaboratively online with the CPO choir to create a piece that the choir members would have direct creative influence on. This was a completely new approach for me – normally my interaction with the choir doesn’t happen until the commission is done! So, my first step for this project was to create a framework that would empower the choristers to think like composers.

I first took the singers through a history of how composers from Renaissance to today have approached text setting. I challenged the singers to analyze a poem and discuss how it could be set musically, and we listened to contrasting settings of that poem to compare our ideas. The choristers then submitted text ideas for our new work, and voted on their favourite. I Rise emerged as the top choice.

In the following session, I shared examples of my own music that demonstrated different ways I have approached text setting, inviting the singers to consider how each approach I described might generate musical ideas for our new piece. Working in small groups, we focused then on I Rise to brainstorm about the poem’s structure, emotional architecture, and backstory, opportunities for word-painting, range, points of dissonance and resolution, excitement and rest.

I came away with a long list of strong musical ideas the singers had developed, and the task of working these ideas into the piece! Some choristers also provided me with a recorded dramatic reading of the poem. I found I was able to stay quite true to the musical ideas we developed together without feeling restricted in my writing; I still had plenty of freedom for my own creative voice. The result, originally composed for choir with piano quintet, is something truly unique and entirely “ours.”

Following the completion of this commission, the CPO worked with Calgary-based advocacy organization Pink Flamingo, inviting the mural artists involved in the group’s Black Lives Matter Mural Project to respond to the music. You can learn about these artists and see their murals here.