Note from Anna:
March, 2020: about to head from Philadelphia to Brooklyn for a meeting with Charlotte Mundy, whose singing I’d been admiring yearning for, really when, like every single other thing, our meeting got cancelled and those eerie initial weeks and months of the pandemic began to unfold. Conditions that, as it would turn out, were conducive to writing a song or two, though not the songs I’d imagined I’d be writing.
Rather, out of necessity, the songs that began to come to life then could be made in the studio with the help of Charles Mueller, who happened to be Charlotte’s housemate at the time And the necessity was as emotional as it was practical, as the first song that we did together was a kind of keepsake song for my son, who was a senior in high school during that strange, sad era What else to do with those thoughts and feelings? Thinking of it as a private project that would go no further than my living room, I worked on lyrics and composed a piano-vocal score for a song called Things Have Changed When Charles started sending along recorded instrumental ideas I felt like someone had bought my song a new dress for the party. This was a new way of making music for me. And it was fun. Things had changed.
Soon after that, as spring became summer, Charles and Charlotte and I started working on studio versions of songs I’d previously composed for concert music performance. My Mother in Love was commissioned by Cygnus Ensemble, and performed by them in 2018, first with soprano Charlotte Dobbs and then with Tony Arnold. Probably because they already had fairly idiomatic guitar parts, we started with song 4, Spare Parts, and song 9, Reading Before Sleeping, though it soon became clear that we would do all ten songs
Two distinct if overlapping compositional directions emerged then for this music professor (I’d begun to circle the idea of being Professor Girlfriend) One involved working in the studio on already-existing and fully-notated songs Like the songs from My Mother in Love, Circular Argument and The Very Air were originally commissioned and premiered as concert music (by the Bowers-Fader Duo) The other direction involved composing songs—always music and lyrics, both—explicitly for this new, studio process. When Girls Learn the Alphabet and Why the Dialectic came to life in this way. The opportunity to let go of genre, whatever that might mean, felt natural, an exciting by-product. Art music, concert music, pop music, alt-emo-rock music who knew? Who knows? Let it be summertime. Let the walls fall right down.