The Making of Suzanne Farrin's Composer Portrait

Miller Theatre commissioned writer Lara Pellegrinelli to create the program notes for the Composer Portraits in the 2022-23 season as well as a series of Q&As with Executive Director Melissa Smey. Here is the third installment, centering around our next Portrait featuring the music of Suzanne Farrin.

Q. Tell us about the spring Composer Portrait concerts.

A. We have three composers: Suzanne Farrin (b. 1976), Øyvind Torvund (b. 1976), and Nicole Mitchell (b. 1967). It's an eclectic group. There aren’t many connecting threads between them. And I think there's something beautiful about that—for audiences to have an opportunity to hear programs that are so different from each other, and with a range of diverse works on each program.

All three composers had premieres that were meant to happen during the pandemic and couldn't. So the Miller Portrait concerts will feature brand new works, which is exciting, and I am very glad to be able to host them.

Q. Were these premieres the driving impulse behind the programming this season?

A. Actually, all three of the spring Portraits grew from collaborations that I've had with ensembles. For Suzanne Farrin and Nicole Mitchell, they’ve been working with International Contemporary Ensemble. For Øyvund Torvund, the recommendation came through Russell Greenberg of Yarn/Wire.

With Suzanne, International Contemporary Ensemble had performed her dolce la Morte (2016), an opera cycle for countertenor and chamber ensemble that had been developed in icelab, on the Metropolitan Museum Presents series a few years ago. The piece uses the love letters from Michelangelo to one of his male protégés as its texts. When the ensemble pitched the portrait concert, I thought, Yes, let’s do this!

Q. Did you know Suzanne well?

A. I had not met her, but she had given a talk at Casa Italiana on her earlier work corpo di terra; it’s a collection of songs without words that are based on Petrarch’s sonnets. As the chair of the Music Department at Hunter College and a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, Suzanne is local to New York City. Her DMA is from Yale.

Her Portrait program will include five selections from dolce la Morte, interwoven with other works including Time is a Cage for violin and polvere et ombra for harp. The instrumentation will be a mix of chamber ensemble alternating with soloists, so that we hear all of these pieces in a new way.

And, of course, we’re also featuring the world premiere of Their Hearts are Columns for soprano, harp, ondes Martenot, and double bass. The piece sets poetry by the Sufi mystical poets Rumi and Hafiz. Sometimes we have an opportunity to commission, an important component of this series for me. In this case, we are fostering the premiere, since the work was commissioned by the Library of Congress and one movement had been done there in 2020.

Q. How would you describe Suzanne’s repertoire in general?

A. The chamber music and solo works are very focused and beautifully made. There's also a theatricality. One gets the sense that a story is unfolding, even when there is no implicit narrative. That is really satisfying.

Even works that are solely instrumental feel like they are meant to be seen. I've been obsessed with her work for Sō Percussion titled A Diamond in the Square (2019), which was filmed for TIME:SPANS 2020. It opens with Josh Quillen playing a piece of string that is threaded through the inside of a piano. First you can see it, and then you can hear it. There’s something so brilliant about this. Obviously, it was filmed with the intention that it would be seen, and it beautifully highlights the work’s inherent theatricality.

Q. This concert also has the novelty of featuring the ondes Martenot in the premiere of Their Hearts are Columns.

A. Yes, which features Suzanne as composer and performer for the concert. We’re so fortunate to have someone of her caliber to perform on this rare, electronic instrument here in New York.

The ondes Martenot is a keyboard instrument that was invented in the late 1920s. It’s like a keyed theremin that produces a beautiful, ethereal sound. The player wears a little ring that they move to change the pitch.

When Tristan Murail was on the faculty here at Columbia, he and his wife Françoise had a pair of ondes Martenot. And anytime we were doing a project that used the instrument, they were the people who we would call. We had done Varése’s Equatorial, which uses two ondes Martenot. The Murails did a demonstration afterwards to demystify the instrument. Honestly, audiences lost their minds.

Q. The instrument seems to have had a small revival because Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood plays one in the band, which spurred the creation of new models based on the older generation of instruments.

A. Well, the sound is definitely out there in the universe. I don't think that there's anyone for whom the sound itself is truly unfamiliar, but the means by which that sound is produced is only revealed for many people the first time they see the instrument in concert.

My early experiences with music as a little kid were through the Reader’s Digest Treasure Chest of Classical Favorites. My mom had these big boxes with records of Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky. I loved them. Then, the first time I saw an orchestra in person, it was mind blowing—like, Oh my God, that's an orchestra? I had no idea. It was such an aha moment.

When I present concerts in which there are unusual instruments, I wonder if there are audience members having a similar aha moment because they know that sound and they’re finally seeing what makes it.