Traveling with the Composers
Each composer’s journey as an artist is personal. Everything the Universe offers touches the souls of humans, and of all beings. These offerings compel artists to create based on their introspective reactions to what touches them, from their observations of everyday life and world events to their desire to explore and expand the bounds of their craft, to their inspiration from other creators, and also their desire to communicate their personal visions to the world—visions that delight us, lift us up, and fill us with wonder.
My musical settings of three Emily Dickinson poems reflect my emotional and personal response to the poetry, and my wish to share these feelings with you, the audience, hoping you may relate to or feel touched by the poems, the music or both. As a composer setting Emily Dickinson’s poems to music, my goal is to set her text in a heartfelt, compassionate and thoughtful manner. The three poems I set relate to one another and form a cycle of songs. Their themes of earthly stresses and longing for relief, unrequited love or happiness, and themes of love in unconditional servitude moved me to set the poems to music and sing them myself.
Emily Dickinson, poet, and Dr. Koren Cowgill, composer/mezzo-soprano
The Outskirts of Hope, a work for solo cello I composed near the end of 2024, tells the story of one whose worldview dances on the periphery of optimism but cannot make the leap necessary to embrace hope. Their desire to inhabit a dwelling place of inner solace and comfort eludes them. Yet they continue to try—reaching toward hope, attempting to overcome the chasms and obstacles that prevent them from attaining peace, contentment and joy.
My friend Gregory Mertl’s composition for cello and piano Offertory (2010) receives its Cape May premier the afternoon of February 9, 2025. Mr. Mertl calls Offertory “an offering for the cellist for whom it was composed, and also an offering on several levels – of my work, as an offering in the ritualistic sense, and as a plaintive, muted plea.”
Dr. Gregory Mertl, composer
As a writer of fiction, especially fantasy and horror, I have long admired Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems. My dear friend composer Philip Rugel set several of Poe’s poems to music in a cycle of songs called A Demon In My View for piano and my voice. When a composer chooses poetry for a cycle of songs, themes of both the poems and the music of the cycle relate, as the music reflects the text. The song from this cycle I’ll sing for you on this concert is called, To One In Paradise, arranged for cello and voice. Some themes from this song, as well as the entire cycle, include loss, sorrow, loneliness and depression.
One of my challenges is that I live with my own mental illness: bipolar disorder and extreme social anxiety. Artists like Edgar Allan Poe, Philip Rugel and so many others make it possible for me to handle a lifetime of challenges stemming from having these mental health issues. Creating art, as well as immersing myself in art made by others, is necessary and cathartic, a means of exorcising my own demons.
Philip Rugel, composer, and Edgar Allan Poe, writer
~Koren Cowgill
