When Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy-winning composer Jennifer Higdon appears at Rhodes College this week, it will be a homecoming of sorts. But it goes far beyond being a simple return to the South from Philadelphia, her base for decades. (Higdon spent her formative years near Seymour, Tennessee, in the eastern end of the state, a world away from Memphis.) Rather, for Higdon, it’s more about seeing people she’s known and worked with for years.
“I have over 200 performances a year, and I have a really busy writing schedule. So I don’t go to most of those performances,” she explains. “But I love working with the Rhodes music department and Bill Scoog there. Not to mention the choir and the Memphis Symphony. So I try to make sure that I have time to get down there when they put something like this on the schedule. There’s something nice about coming back and visiting with people you know and care about. Something about making music that way — it’s special.”
The performance Higdon speaks of will indeed be a charmed moment. On Saturday, April 2nd, at Rhodes’ McNeill Concert Hall, the MasterSingers Chorale and the Memphis Symphony Orchestra will perform “The Music of Jennifer Higdon” with Rhodes professor of music William Skoog conducting. At the heart of the concert will be one of Higdon’s most powerful works, The Singing Rooms. While the title may suggest intimate chamber music, the seven-movement composition is really a dynamic rendering of the overwhelming passions that familiar rooms can evoke.
Describing how the piece came to be, Higdon notes that “I was looking at the poetry of Jeanne Minahan [which is incorporated into the work], and it made me think of walking around a big farm house, where each room has a personality. It dredges up these emotions. There’s a lot of energy in that piece. When I wrote it, it was an interesting challenge to have a solo violin with a huge chorus and an orchestra backing it. That’s a difficult thing to balance.”
That’s especially true in a live setting. Yet Higdon can barely conceal her delight that in-person concerts are once again happening, after so many live-streamed performances at the height of quarantine. “I think the pandemic made us appreciate the live music experience. Especially with something like The Singing Rooms,” she says. “That piece takes the roof off the hall it’s in. The third movement comes at you like a freight train. It is unbelievable when you hear it live because when you have a full orchestra, with the brass section and the choir, it’s hair-raising! And that’s the kind of thing you start to appreciate in a live music scene. There’s something about it that’s magical.”
Such magical, emotional experiences are at the heart of Higdon’s work. “My music doesn’t fall in the category of an academic sound. To me, it’s important that the music speaks to the performers because if the performers believe in it and are moved by it, they play it differently.”
The roots of Higdon’s music-making are decidedly non-academic as well. “I grew up on a farm in East Tennessee, and I was self-taught on the flute. I can remember walking out on the farm, all the sounds. The soundtrack of my childhood was the whip-poor-wills and the crickets and even the mountain lions.” She also stresses the influence of non-auditory experiences. “I grew up in a visual arts family with a lot of experimental painting, and even animation,” she notes. “My dad was an artist who listened to rock-and-roll at home. So my childhood wasn’t populated with classical music.”
Such aesthetic cross-pollination between different mediums will be the topic of Higdon’s talk on March 31st, as a Rhodes College Springfield Music Lecturer. “I’ve always thought in terms of pictures and paintings,” she says. “You’re constantly having to visualize the stuff going around your head. Sometimes writing music means exactly that. So I put a little film together for this presentation, and the very first segment is on Jackson Pollock because I have a chamber piece called American Canvas, based on three American artists and their styles of working. It’s all connected and it’s fascinating. And the pandemic put me in a frame of mind where I’m thinking about it a lot more.”
UPDATE: The performance of “The Music of Jennifer Higdon” on Saturday, April 2nd, at Rhodes’ McNeill Concert Hall has been cancelled “due to unforeseen circumstances.” Jennifer Higdon’s lecture on Thursday, March 31st will go on as planned.