Composer Eric Nathan to Release New Album, SOME FAVORED NOOK, Libretto by Mark Campbell

On Friday, September 15, 2023, composer Eric Nathan's song cycle Some Favored Nook - capturing themes of love, war, and women's rights through the writings of Emily Dickinson - will be released as a new album on New Focus Recordings. Composed as a dramatic song cycle for soprano, baritone and piano, Some Favored Nook delves deeply into Dickinson's correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a passionate 19th century abolitionist and women's rights advocate known in his day as an essayist, minister and military officer in the American Civil War. Their entwined thoughts, from the tiniest private observation to social commentary of a universal scope, form a riveting discourse, set to music by Nathan and refined by librettist Mark Campbell. Since making its live world premiere in 2019 at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Some Favored Nook has been described as "intimate and personal ... people were weeping at the end" (Arts and Culture Texas) and "a work that deserves to be heard again and again" (Theater Jones).

Composed and workshopped during Nathan's residencies at the Copland House, Yellow Barn and the American Academy in Rome, Some Favored Nook weaves together passages from Dickinson's poetry and her exchange with Higginson, yielding a three-part song cycle broken into 15 tracks. Featured on the album are soprano Tony Arnold, baritone William Sharp, and pianist Seth Knopp, the same artists who have brought the work to life in public performances. The work's title derives from a line by Higginson, who broods on the constraints that stifled women artists of his time, comparing their work to a plant permitted to thrive only in "some favored nook," and not in the broader soil of a society not yet ready to appreciate it.

In his notes on the album, Nathan describes how the work was set in motion by a 2015 visit to the room where Dickinson once wrote, now part of the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts. "A week later, I began drafting the piano's opening gestures of Some Favored Nook-luminous, fragile music written without pedal and only the sustain created from held pitches," he recalls. "It captures what being in that intimate space meant to me." Nathan goes on to describe how the work took shape when Campbell joined the project as librettist, "reworking the phrasing and structure of the texts I had assembled... and returned a libretto to me in three parts that told a story so masterfully that upon my first reading it I could already hear music in my mind."

"As I worked to set [the] writings and story to music, I began to see myself as a film director as much as a composer," Nathan writes. "I imagined my music serving like a director's camera, helping us focus on the intricate emotions playing on a character's face, or larger issues that only we can see, and that a character may not. ... I have also kept re-meeting Some Favored Nook as a piece of music, as it has taken on a life of its own through its performers' heartfelt interpretations and audiences' responses."

The composition of Some Favored Nook was supported by a Rome Prize fellowship and Visiting Artist residency at the American Academy in Rome, as well as a Copland House Residency Award. The recording was made possible, in part, by the Brown Arts Institute and Brown University.

Among its notable live performances, Some Favored Nook has been presented by the Emily Dickinson Museum; the Clark Art Institute; FirstWorks in Providence, who presented the East Coast premiere; and Yellow Barn, the Vermont-based center for musical discovery where it was workshopped and shaped into its current form. It was performed as part of Yellow Barn's 50th anniversary celebrations in 2019, and again in June 2023 as the centerpiece of a portrait concert of Nathan's works, with Nathan in attendance as a faculty member in Yellow Barn's Young Artists Program.

As part of his upcoming schedule, Nathan will again collaborate with Yellow Barn on the premiere of his Double Concerto No. 2 at the New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall on September 19, 2023, part of a concert of world premieres all written in memory of violist Roger Tapping. Double Concerto No. 2 will close the concert, with Nathan conducting and both Hsin-Yun Huang and Misha Amory featured as viola soloists. They will perform with a string orchestra composed of Yellow Barn musicians, plus members of the Parker, Ariel and Jupiter String Quartets - all students of Tapping's at the New England Conservatory's Quartet-in-Residence graduate program. The piece will also be performed by the New York Classical Players later in the season.

Among Nathan's other 2023/2024 season highlights, Winsor Music will perform his piece Dancing with J.S. Bach II, featuring oboist Peggy Pearson, on September 30, 2023 at 7:00PM at St. Paul's Church in Brookline, MA. Some Favored Nook will be performed by Arnold, Sharp and Knopp at the Peabody Conservatory on October 2, 2023. On October 23, 2023, Nathan's work In Between II will be featured in its Boston premiere by the New England Philharmonic at Jordan Hall. In October 2023, trombonist Bruce Collings will perform a revised premiere of Nathan's work As Above, So Below - featuring a unique two-belled trombone - at the American Academy in Rome. On February 23, 2024, Nathan's piece Bright Light will be performed by Sandbox Percussion at Brown University.

About Eric Nathan

Celebrated for music "as diverse as it is arresting" (San Francisco Chronicle), composer Eric Nathan (b. 1983) has been hailed internationally for his incisive and original portfolio of work. Recognized with honors including a Rome Prize and Guggenheim Fellowship, he has received commissions from such institutions as the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, among many other prestigious ensembles and artists. Currently Composer-in-Residence with the New England Philharmonic since 2019, Nathan has been praised as "thoughtful and inventive" (The New Yorker) and "a marvel of musical logic" (Boston Classical Review) with a "constant vein of ingenuity and expressive depth" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Early in the 2023/2024 season, Nathan releases a new album, Some Favored Nook, capturing his acclaimed song cycle of the same name - a deep musical exploration of the writings of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson that speaks the struggles for women's rights and the abolition of slavery in Civil War era America. As his season gets underway, Nathan collaborates with Yellow Barn in Boston on the premiere of his Double Concerto No. 2, part of a concert of world premieres written in memory of violist Roger Tapping with violists Hsin-Yun Huang and Misha Amory, and the Parker, Ariel and Jupiter String Quartets. Among Nathan's other season highlights, his piece Dancing with J.S. Bach II will be performed by Winsor Music, while Some Favored Nook will be performed at the Peabody Conservatory. Nathan's work In Between II will be featured in its Boston premiere by the New England Philharmonic, while trombonist Bruce Collings will perform a revised premiere of his work As Above, So Below in Rome. In February 2024, Nathan's piece Bright Light will be performed by Sandbox Percussion.

Among his recent highlights, Nathan's work Omaggio a Gesualdo, commissioned by the New York Classical Players, was featured in its West Coast premiere by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra. His new piece Dream Scenes, an homage to Robert Schummann co-commissioned by Tonhalle Düsseldorf and Royal Danish Library, made its world premiere at Schumannfest Düsseldorf. Nathan also returned to Yellow Barn for a portrait concert of his works and a residency with the festival's Young Artists Program.

Over the course of his career, Nathan's works have gained worldwide acclaim through performances by Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as well as the National Symphony Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, International Contemporary Ensemble, Boston Symphony Chamber Players, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, JACK Quartet, American Brass Quintet, Ensemble Dal Niente, and A Far Cry. His compositions have also been performed by artists including vocalists Dawn Upshaw, Lucy Shelton, Tony Arnold, Jessica Rivera; violinists Jennifer Koh and Stefan Jackiw; trombonist Joseph Alessi; and pianists Saleem Ashkar, Gloria Cheng and Gilbert Kalish. His music has been featured at the New York Philharmonic's 2014 and 2016 Biennials, and at Carnegie Hall, Aldeburgh Music Festival, Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, Aspen Music Festival, MATA Festival, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Ravinia Festival Steans Institute, Yellow Barn, 2012 and 2013 World Music Days, and Louvre Museum.

Among his many commissions, Nathan has composed works for the Tanglewood Music Center, Barlow Endowment, Fromm Music Foundation, Aspen Music Festival, Boston Musica Viva, Chelsea Music Festival, New York Virtuoso Singers, Collage New Music, and University of Chicago's Grossman Ensemble. Nathan's Opening (2021) for orchestra, co-commissioned by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation at the Library of Congress, was premiered by the MSO and broadcast nationally on a PBS television special in 2021.

Nathan's career honors include a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a Copland House residency, Civitella Ranieri Music Fellowship, ASCAP's Rudolf Nissim Prize, four ASCAP Morton Gould Awards, BMI's William Schuman Prize, Aspen Music Festival's Jacob Druckman Prize, Leonard Bernstein Fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center, and an Early Career Research Achievement Award from Brown University. He has completed residencies at Yellow Barn, Copland House, and the American Academy in Rome.

Since his debut album Multitude, Solitude: Eric Nathan (Albany Records, 2015), produced by Grammy-winning producer Judith Sherman, Nathan has released or collaborated on several other recordings. In 2019, Chelsea Music Festival Records released Eric Nathan: Dancing with J.S. Bach, featuring conductor Ken-David Masur in Nathan's two suites of orchestrations of Bach keyboard works. In 2020, Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project released a portrait album of Nathan's orchestral and large ensemble music on the BMOP Sound label. In 2022, New Focus Recordings released a two-CD set of Missing Words (described as "brilliantly original stuff" by Musical America). Additional recordings of Nathan's music have been released on Bridge Records.

A passionate educator and advocate for contemporary composers, Nathan serves as Associate Professor of Music in composition and theory at Brown University's Department of Music - engaging students with and without musical backgrounds through subjects ranging from composition to popular music history. He was the 2018 recipient of Brown University's Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship for excellence in teaching, the university's most prestigious honor for junior faculty. In addition, Nathan previously took on the post of David S. Josephson Assistant Professor at Brown, served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Williams College, and taught composition at the New York Philharmonic's Composer's Bridge program.

Nathan is currently Composer-in-Residence with the New England Philharmonic, an appointment that began with the 2019-20 season. He previously served as Composer-in-Residence at the 2013 Chelsea Music Festival (New York) and 2013 Chamber Music Campania (Italy). He received his doctorate from Cornell, and holds degrees from Yale (B.A.) and Indiana University (M.M.), as well as a diploma from the Pre-College Division of The Juilliard School. His principal teachers include Claude Baker, Sven-David Sandström and Steven Stucky. He has also served as a composition fellow at Tanglewood, Aspen, Aldeburgh and the Composers Conference. Learn more at www.ericnathanmusic.com.

Some Favored Nook Tracklist

Eric Nathan - Some Favored Nook (2019)
Part I
1. To tell me what is true? [4:49]
2. The nearest dream recedes unrealized [2:45]
3. Could you tell me how to grow? [3:01]
4. They shut me up in Prose [3:53]
5. My barefoot rank is better [2:10]

Part II
6. To see if we were growing [3:19]
7. War feels to me an oblique place [1:58]
8. There suddenly arose [2:45]
9. Emancipation [2:47]
10. All sounds ceased [2:54]
11. There came a wind like a bugle [1:54]
12. Attending to the wounded [2:18]
13. That shamed the nation [2:01]

Part III
14. These are my introduction [5:51]
15. My Wars are laid away in Books / No Prisoner be [3:23]

Total Time: 45:54

Album Credits
Produced by Judith Sherman
Mastered by Antonio Oliart
Album Design by Denise Burt
Images courtesy of the Emily Dickinson Museum
Inside Jacket Photo Credit: Jon Crispin
This recording was made possible, in part, by the Brown Arts Institute
FCR383

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