By Wynne Delacoma
“Not a single note was changed. The structure of the piece—everything, everything—is completely based on that [Susan B. Anthony] speech. And there’s a four-minute interlude where the climax of the piece is. I had the image of Anthony looking into the future and seeing women going to the polls and voting. So, even though I had a new quote, everything had to match that image.”
Composer Stacy Garrop spends little time in the proverbial ivory tower.
Some of her recent compositions have focused on contemporary topics ranging from the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (My Dearest Ruth) to the fraught balance between human beings and planet earth (Terra Nostra). But last year’s endless churn of dire headlines nearly swamped one of her newest works, The Battle for the Ballot. A 17-minute piece for narrator and orchestra, it will have its Midwest premiere at Ravinia July 10 with Marin Alsop conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
In summer 2019, when California’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music asked Garrop for a new work, nobody expected major difficulties. Music Director Cristian Măcelaru wanted a composition for narrator and orchestra celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed American women the right to vote. Based in Chicago, Garrop had been steadily gaining a national reputation with commissions from orchestras, including the Saint Louis Symphony, and performances by the Kronos Quartet. The Battle for the Ballot was scheduled for Cabrillo’s summer 2020 season.
Like all large-scale music events, those plans were completely upended by the global Covid-19 pandemic that struck the US in March 2020. With no chance of live performances, Cabrillo eventually went ahead as a streamed series of virtual performances. Festival officials offered to postpone Garrop’s piece for a year, but she opted to continue composing, and the work had its digital premiere August 9 that summer.
Starting her research with a deep plunge into the history of women’s suffrage, Garrop had come up with the idea of using quotes from leading 19th-century suffragists for her text. But after coming across an especially compelling 1873 speech by Susan B. Anthony, perhaps the movement’s best-known figure, she changed her mind. The text, she decided, would be excerpts from only that speech.
Garrop has composed operas, an oratorio, and many songs, but the balance between spoken word and orchestra in a work like The Battle for the Ballot can be tricky. She closely studied Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait, which expertly alternates the two for maximum emotional impact.
“I really thought of this as a chamber concerto with the narrator as a soloist,” said Garrop.
Getting The Battle for the Ballot ready for digital performance was grueling. Musicians in the 40-piece Cabrillo orchestra had to record their parts individually, video as well as audio, in their own homes or studios. But by early summer, the recorded orchestral tracks were finished and ready to go for a virtual concert. All that remained was recording the narration and adding that track to the orchestral stream.
By this time, however, the country was in turmoil following the May 25 death of George Floyd, the Black man who died under the knee of a police officer in Minneapolis. Garrop had been vaguely aware that the women’s suffrage movement had some dark, relatively unexplored corners. In the final decades of the long, grueling push for voting rights, white women suffragists drastically minimized the presence and rights of Black women in their movement. Now Garrop realized The Battle for the Ballot had to confront this unsettling history.
“The Cabrillo Festival tends to be progressive in terms of thinking about what makes society run,” said Garrop. “Already one or two people had reached out saying, ‘We’re feeling a little unsure.’ Then one of the musicians declined to record her part because she was of color. That was the first time I thought, ‘Okay, what I’ve done is wrong.’ But I didn’t completely understand why, so I began doing more research. That’s when I began to realize that Susan B. Anthony [who died in 1906] and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who tended to work together a lot, basically aligned themselves with white supremacists. They said some really, really awful things. My stomach churned.”
Since all the orchestral tracks were already recorded, Garrop could only rework the still-unrecorded text. She asked the festival for one more week and plunged back into virtually round-the-clock research.
“The good thing about having done so much research the first time around,” she said, “at least I had a starting point. The NAACP started a magazine called The Crisis pretty much right after they formed in the 1910 era. I found two particular editions, 1912 and a few years later, about suffrage. Most of the articles were by women.”
Trawling Amazon.com, she discovered a few upcoming books about Black suffragists. She ordered them, immediately “tore through them,” and discovered women she had never heard of before. Delving into the footnotes, she dug further.
“I had one day where I printed out every single quote I could ever use,” said Garrop. “I spread them all out on the floor, sat on the futon for at least 10 hours. I said, ‘Okay, given the form that the piece already has, what is the story I can shape given these quotes?’ ”
Garrop wanted quotes from equal numbers of Black and white suffragists, if not more Black. In its final form, the text includes words from four Black and three white women.
Not only did the new quotes have to tell a compelling story. They had to fit the exact time span of the words they were replacing. A new twelve-second quote might hit exactly the right emotional pitch for an eight-second slot. But with the orchestral tracks already recorded, Garrop couldn’t provide those four extra seconds. “It was like putting a jigsaw puzzle together,” she said.
Oddly enough, though, having an inflexible musical structure helped shape the new text.
“I feel that the music really does justice to the idea,” Garrop said. “Not a single note was changed. The structure of the piece—everything, everything—is completely based on that [Susan B. Anthony] speech. And there’s a four-minute interlude where the climax of the piece is. I had the image of Anthony looking into the future and seeing women going to the polls and voting. So, even though I had a new quote, everything had to match that image.”
“I’m glad Cabrillo gave me the chance to rewrite the piece,” said Garrop. “I think in certain parts of the country, it would have had an extremely short shelf life. People would have looked at it and said, ‘Well, she’s completely out of touch. She has no understanding of what’s going on.’ I’m very glad for the wake-up call.”
As a composer, Garrop sees herself as something of a split personality.
“I feel like one half is the Greek gods and goddesses, or Hindu or other cultures, where I’m exploring mythology,” she said. (Her 2019 commission from Chicago’s Grant Park Orchestra was titled Shiva Dances.) “But there’s always been an activist half of me. You see it in pieces like Terra Nostra, my oratorio about climate change. Glorious Mahalia uses the voices of Mahalia Jackson and [Chicago radio personality and Pulitzer Prize–winning author] Studs Terkel talking about civil rights. That half is saying, What can a composer do to make our society think and improve on who are and raise us all up together? Or more simply, What can I do to be helpful without becoming a politician?”
Though the 19th Amendment became law 100 years ago, Garrop believes the battle for the ballot still rages.
“They found ways to suppress the vote for Black women until the 1965 Voting Rights Act,” she said. “And in 2013 the Supreme Court struck down the part where Southern states needed to show that they’re not discriminating. Things are starting to spiral out of control again. We’re seeing just how valuable it is for us to keep our eyes on the ball in terms of democracy.”
Wynne Delacoma was classical music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1991 to 2006 and has been an adjunct journalism faculty member at Northwestern University. She is a freelance music critic, writer, and lecturer.