Update Title: 29280D0A-49DC-4527-8804-1BA6646F1F6E

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Kèthe Kollwitz was written in response to a commission from violist Julia Adams for a work celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the Portland String Quartet in 1998.  Julia specifically wanted a large-scale work that the quartet could perform with soprano Christina Astrachan.  Given this combination of artists, the idea of composing some sort of "musical portrait," with Christina singing the words (perhaps letters of journal entries) of a real person, immediately came to mind.

Several days later, by a stroke of what I now consider to be near-cosmic good fortune, I came across Muriel Rukeyser's haunting Kathe Kollwitz in her 1968 collection The Speed of Darkness.

Following Rukeyser's text, the piece is in five parts.  All five poems contain imagery taken from Kollwitz's work (gates, poles, children, hands), as well as direct references to specific works (Pieta, Nie Wieder Krieg).  Part two quotes extensively from Kollwitz's own journals on matters of life and art and part three makes use of important biographical details.  Part five vividly evokes the experience of turning the pages of a book of Kollwitz's work and the resulting time-lapse effect of viewing a lifetime's worth of self-portraits.  Throughout, both the poet and her subject make extensive allusions to music.

Quite naturally, the music of Kèthe Kollwitz is as much a response to the poems themselves as it is to the art and artist that they reflect, quote and comment upon. In composing this work, I came to feel that while the vocal line was the voice of the poet, the voice of Kollwitz herself could be heard in the writing for the quartet.  My goal has been to compose a work in which lines of poetry, lines of music and the lyrical, terrifying lines of Kollwitz's beloved etchings, woodcuts and lithographs might interlace across time and, in Muriel Rukeyser's beautiful words, "make an art harder than bronze."  --Tom Myron

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