Oberlin’s Kendra Colton, Associate Professor of Voice, will be retiring at the end of this semester, after one final concert with her chamber voice class on Friday, May 9th at 6pm in Stull Recital Hall. Included on the program will be the world premiere of third-year Max Lang’s They Shut Me Up in Prose for string quartet and five voices, set to an Emily Dickinson poem of the same name. Asked to play violin on the piece, I was curious to learn more, so I chatted with Lang in the conservatory lounge after a rehearsal to ask about the work and their experience working with Colton.
In spring of 2024, Colton asked if any composer would be interested in writing for her class. Since then, Lang has been invited to write music for three consecutive semesters. “The fact that she has been coming to me, a musical studies major, means a lot,” said Lang, “because musical studies students are usually not afforded the same opportunities as composition students in the conservatory.”
Lang started as a composer in the beginning of their sophomore year, allowing Colton to see and mentor their growth as a composer across three semesters. “She has fostered in me the importance of having a clear vision and being able to talk about it. She is great to work with in terms of collaboration and sharing ideas.” In rehearsal, Colton encourages Lang to provide feedback and notes to the singers. “It’s been a great experience as I have been growing as a composer, because I have learned the importance of having my own opinions and actually voicing them.”
When Colton reached out to Lang about a third and final semester, they immediately accepted the offer, saying “it’s really special. I knew I had to do it because it would be the last time I would work with her and get to have the special experience working with the singers.”
The commissions have always been open-ended. “It’s intimidating that I have so much control over my creative choices, but it is also really fun that I get to explore different ensembles and uses of text,” Lang said. Colton allowed them to set anything — text in the public domain, their own text, or even neutral syllables. Lang has set their own text for a commission from Colton before, though this time they chose a poem by Emily Dickinson.
“I fell in love with Emily Dickinson’s poems at age 13, when my English teacher read I Felt a Funeral in my Brain to the class.” They were exposed to increasingly more of Dickinson’s poems throughout their high school curriculum, and kept coming back to You Shut Me Up in Prose. By sophomore year of college, they set the text in an art song for mezzo-soprano and piano. “There are a lot of themes that I relate to, especially those of feeling confined, and wanting to subvert society’s expectations on how someone in a gender minority should behave,” Lang explained, “and I wanted to reflect those feelings because it is something that I often feel deeply in a piece of music.”
For Colton’s concert, Lang rearranged the art song from sophomore year, adding more vocal parts and a string quartet, though they kept much of the original’s form and ideas. As Lang explained, they achieve a sense of circular motion by repeating the first stanza at the end of the piece, but slower, to evoke containment. Throughout, there are cascades of triplets that were present in the original, and Lang intentionally maintained and developed the idea in the new version. Similarly, there were instances of text which Lang repeated to further emphasize the parts they felt the most important. The lack of change in the accompaniment makes the repetitions feel insisting and confining.
The concert will include more than just Lang’s piece, featuring a work by second-year Calvin Ray Shawler for voices and wind instruments, and other chamber vocal music. Come to the May 9th show to support Professor Colton leading her last concert before her well-deserved retirement.
thecounterpoint.org 