两年前，Katherine Balch在核桃小溪的加州交响乐团居住的作曲家，并准备公布她尝试的最雄心勃勃的创造性项目：三个声乐独奏家。
Then COVID hit, and the piece, titled “Illuminate,” went into a drawer.
Since that time, the 30-year-old San Diego native has gone on to other creative projects, many of them more pandemic-friendly. She got married, high atop a Colorado mountain, to fellow composer and hiking enthusiast Ted Moore. And she waited to hear “Illuminate” in performance.
Now the wait is over. Music Director Donato Cabrera is scheduled to conduct the work’s world premiere on Saturday, March 26, with mezzo-soprano Kelly Guerra and sopranos Molly Netter and Alexandra Smither as soloists. The piece intertwines texts by French writer Arthur Rimbaud with poetry by the late American feminist Adrienne Rich and Argentina’s Alejandra Pizarnik, as well as Canadian writer Anne Carson and San Francisco native Sharon Olds.
Balch spoke with The Chronicle by phone from the campus of Cornell University in New York, where she was in the midst of a short residency before joining the faculty at the Yale School of Music in the fall.
问：自2020年以来，“照亮”发生了什么？这只是坐在寒冷的储存等上吗？
A:Yes. You know, everyone had some COVID losses that were bigger than others, and this was a very tough one for me.
Q: What made the postponement particularly disappointing?
A:This was by far the most substantial piece of music I’ve written in my life. It’s substantial in scope and in size, and it’s substantial for me emotionally and intellectually. It deals with a lot of things I have been thinking about and dreaming about in my musical practice over the years — particularly the joy and the magic of sound.
Q: That’s a surprising description of a piece that includes a lot of settings of poetic texts.
A:嗯，实际上，文本的可听性不是体验这件作品的大外带。对我来说，文本始终是Timbre和表达的车辆。我并不是那么担心这些话清楚。我经常将文本映射到乐器节奏上，或分解文本的音素内容并将其变成非语言。
This text is quite abstract, but it’s certainly more concrete than music. And I’ve worked very hard to assemble this collection of poems that I think resemble in words what I want people to have to experience musically.
问：你现在比两年前的这件事有不同的意义吗？
A:Yes, absolutely. When I turned this piece in to the California Symphony, I was elated. I felt it was the best piece of music I’d ever written, and that I would learn a lot from hearing it about my own practice and about the next steps.
But now, two years have passed, and there’s been a global pandemic and a war in Europe, which hasn’t happened in my lifetime. And the piece is still there, like a statue, and I’ve sort of walked around it, or moved to a different angle. So I just don’t know what it will feel like to finally hear it, and that’s scary.
Q: What have you been doing musically in the interim?
A:I’m someone who needs pretty immediate feedback — like, when I write a piece, I finish it as close to the premiere as I can and then I’m ready to hear it. Each piece I write informs the next one, and because I couldn’t get that kind of feedback for two years, my tool set changed.
I made several installation projects that involved building things and learning basic arts and crafts skills. I built an installation involving 48 automated aluminum wind chimes. I built these giant papier-mache waterdrop sculptures that play recordings of water. I started working a lot with recordings of myself, singing every line of a piece and making these mock-ups with my voice — which was a way to hear my music, because I couldn’t otherwise.
问：那么你现在在这个迟来的首映式之前是什么感受？你兴奋吗？忧虑？那些组合的组合？
A:I think the first rehearsal is going to be hard. I’m so excited, but also there’s this apprehension in the back of my head that at any moment I could get a phone call that says, “You know what? I’m sorry, it’s not going to happen.” I don’t think I’ll really believe it until it’s the end of the first performance.
加州交响曲：7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 26. 4 p.m. Sunday, March 27. $20-$74. Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek. 925-943-7469.www.californiasymphony.org.