Emily Albrink - Force of Nature (2023)

“…(T)his song cycle was written in honor of Nancy Albrink, a passionate collaborative pianist, pedagogue, and mother…I truly believe that more song cycles about the modern female experience — beyond Frauenliebe — need to enter the repertoire and be available for female singers.” -Rene Orth

Among Western classical art songs for women, Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben still occupies a place of honor almost two centuries after its composition, yet it’s no surprise that a living composer would reference this work when speaking about women singers’ desire for greater variety of subject and expression in song repertoire. Frauenliebe continues to loom large in our thoughts and programming in no small part because it stood alone in the genre for so many years. Women have been writing words and music for centuries, but it requires a system of commitment for those compositions to be heard, repeated, programmed, and remembered. The words and music of men, written for men to sing, found easier access to that group commitment.

And so men on the art song stage have had cycle after cycle to choose from, encompassing an enormous range of human experience. In works that are considered “mainstream,” men have been able to sing of love, desire, jealousy, murder, war, fatherhood, anger, drunkenness, God, nature, writing, composition, fear, bravery, shame, suicide, physical labor, homesickness, and the act of singing itself. Women in those spaces found a smaller range of stories about their lives. And within the most intimate emotions, there tended to be a conservative sameness, mirroring the smaller acceptable range of public expression granted women. Men in tuxedos, in shining halls, could sing of lying in wait to murder their lover, or of hallucinating three suns in the sky, or of trying to apologize to their comrade killed in war. Women in those halls found life rather uniformly beautiful or sad. They were like flowers, or birds, and were never given to plotting about their husbands, or wishing themselves free of their children.

Like her daughter Emily, Nancy Albrink was a performer, a teacher, a wife, a mother, and a friend. When Emily began formulating this musical tribute to Nancy, she knew she wanted to contribute to our “system of commitment” by making new music possible and giving it the chance for a long life by performing and recording it. And most of all, she wanted to be part of creating work that would give women a chance to sing about all parts of our lives, not only the sentimental or culturally admirable ones. She wanted songs of impatience, poor judgment, shallowness, resilience, and risk; about gossiping or fleeing violence or navigating mood swings or turning up the radio. And that’s what these songs do.

Throughout these four new works also runs the strong thread of legacy: of passing experience, wisdom, and care from one generation to the next. This is the story of Nancy and Emily, and of mothers and children everywhere, too close for any of us to understand clearly as we live it. We worry about our children as we look forward into a future we will not see, and we look back for our mothers through a lens of late understanding. How grateful I am for the chance to perform and teach these new works, and for more rich voices to tell these complex stories of fragility, power, and love.

“A wise person once told me that, if we are lucky, there is a special person in our lives who ‘gives us the gold.’ For me, it was my Grandmother Sophie…Before I started school, she had taught me to read, write, etc., and she gave me a sense that I could do anything and be anything that I wanted. She was not anyone special in the world at large, but she was more than special to me.” - Steve Rouse