MusicSpoke | Artist Owned Sheet Music™

About the Score

Hope was commissioned by Seattle Girls’ Choir for Prime Voci—their advanced high-school ensemble—to help celebrate the 30th Anniversary of this great organization. When their conductor, Jake Winkler, and I first met to discuss the commission, I asked him what ideas he had in mind for the piece. He provided me with a wonderful bit of inspiration by asking that the piece embody one of the aspects of the mission of Seattle Girls’ Choir: the empowerment of young women as they enter adulthood. He explained that SGC works to instill the qualities of self-reliance, effectiveness, excellence, accountability, and discipline in the singers as part of their overall singing experience. The theme of making the transition into adulthood became my guiding light as I searched for a text, and I was particularly drawn to the notion of composing a work based on an inspirational text that these talented young women could take with them into adulthood and that would aid them throughout their lives. To that end I ultimately decided to use a text by Emily Dickinson, whose Hope is the thing with feathers is one of her most beloved and well-known poems. Upon reading the first few lines of the poem, I knew I had found the message I wanted to share with the women of Prime Voci: one of the most powerful things that helps us through life’s challenges is hope. In order to reflect Dickinson’s theme of the constancy of hope, I chose a musical structure in which the same basic music is used for each stanza, reflecting that sense of the steadfast nature of hope. So this work could be considered a Theme and Variations. The musical variations for the second and third stanzas of the poem reflect the text in each stanza, yet the music representing hope remains recognizable throughout.

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