Timeless Feelings and Healing
By Kyle MacMillan
Like almost everyone else who was alive at the time in the United States, Ryan Townsend Strand was profoundly affected by the horrific terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and the thousands of deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But to the Chicago tenor, these events still seemed too recent, and the wounds too raw, to confront directly through his musical art. So in 2020 he turned to another shocking moment in the nation’s history as a proxy to begin to come to terms with the grief the two incidents provoked—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
In collaboration with pianist Karina Kontorovitch, Strand oversaw the creation of Letters to Jackie, a program consisting of 14 song settings of letters of condolence and support written to Jacqueline Kennedy following her husband’s death—800,000 within just the first two weeks, and double that in the years that followed.
“The whole point of this journey has been addressing a very basic human condition,” the Russian-born Kontorovitch said of the four-year project. “We have all lost someone at some point, or will. It’s something that everybody shares, regardless of where you come from.”
Tenor Ryan Townsend Strand (Photo: Atlas Arts Media)
After previews in Minneapolis and Bozeman, MT, the two musicians presented the premiere of Letters to Jackie in November 2023 at Chicago’s Epiphany Center for the Arts, marking the 60th anniversary of the assassination. Ravinia will host the second Chicago-area performance November 16 as part of the Fall Series in Bennett Gordon Hall.
“Singing a recital at Ravinia is a huge deal,” Strand said. “The names that come through the festival are both impressive and inspiring. To have Jeffrey Haydon, Ravinia’s President and CEO, along with Artistic Producer Hinano Price, believe in the power of this program and the artistry of both myself and Karina is incredible.”
Strand is a member of multiple professional choirs, including the Music of the Baroque Chorus and Grant Park Chorus, and has appeared in several roles with the Haymarket Opera Company. In addition, he has served since 2016 as executive director of the Constellation Men’s Ensemble, an eight-voice, all-male choral group that presents an annual series of concerts and performs in schools across the city.
The 35-year-old tenor was not alive during the Kennedy era, but he has always been drawn to its history. “I don’t know if it comes from having journalist parents,” he said, “or being obsessed with political dramas growing up, or what have you, but I find that time period to be fascinating from senses of politics, fashion, culture, etc.”
Pianist Karina Kontorovitch (Photo: Atlas Arts Media)
In graduate school at Northwestern University, even Strand’s master’s vocal recital was Kennedy-connected. Though none of the songs he chose spoke directly about the president, they did address themes that were prominent in his life, including US Naval service, fatherhood, and Catholicism.
Cut off from much of the outside world and unable to perform publicly during COVID-19, the singer again found his thoughts turning to Kennedy and his murder. “I just had this idea,” he said, “that we’re all starved for art, and we’re all experiencing this collective grief, and there is nowhere to put it. There are no really communal ways to deal with it.”
As he was living through the pandemic, he realized that many of the emotions that crisis engendered were similar to those he and others felt during and after 9/11, including an absence of energy and a sense of helplessness.
“Grief and tragedy and loss are timeless. … [This feels] universal, not just about one local moment in history.”
He looked around at what other events spoke to similar feelings, and he quickly landed on Kennedy’s assassination and the outpouring of sadness—but also support—that followed. He conceived the idea of a program of art songs based on a few of the thousands of letters famously sent to Jackie Kennedy.
For advice, he turned to Zachary Vanderburg, who now serves as development and communications director for England’s Opera Rara, an organization that promotes the rediscovery of rare and forgotten operas from the 19th and 20th centuries. At the time, Vanderburg was interested in becoming a kind of consultant to artists wanting to bring an idea to life, and Letters to Jackie served as a trial essay.
Working with Vanderburg, Strand looked ahead and realized that 2023 would be the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, an ideal tie-in for the project’s debut. “Three years seemed like enough time to not only get the music in order but also to fundraise and make sure this could actually happen,” he said.
In addition to putting together a fundraising goal of $80,000 for the commissions and other costs—$75,000 of which has been raised to date from individual donors—he selected about 100 letters as options for the project and then had to find and engage composers willing to create their song settings from those picks.
Composer Libby Larsen (Photo: Ann Marsden)
Putting an emphasis on diversity, Strand assembled a list of 25 potential composers. As he reached out to many of them, the positive responses soon followed, including some from such well-known voices as Libby Larsen. In the end, he settled on 14 composers. “I had only asked about 22 people total, so I got a lot more yeses than nos,” he said.
One of those yeses came from Augusta Read Thomas, a 2007 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Music and composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1997–2006. Strand had previously worked with Thomas on several projects, including the performances of a couple of her works by the Constellation Men’s Ensemble.
Composer Augusta Read Thomas (Photo: Anthony Barlich)
Rather than simply set one letter to music, Thomas chose to create her own kind of poetic text by compiling sentences from seven different letters. “There is something different when one is writing a letter,” she said. “For the sensitivity of this project and other vocal works, I prefer to work in a genre that is closer to poetry. There is just a different kind of feel to the words.”
Further separating the work from the others on the program, Thomas came up with the idea of a two-part work titled Oh Jacqueline—a four-minute processional by the singer onto the stage and a three-minute recessional. “I had this image in my mind of the hearse with Kennedy’s body in it and all the people marching behind it and lots of people on the streets,” she said. She made her approach completely optional, giving Strand the choice of simply performing the four-minute section in a standard way, but he has chosen to follow her concept.
Composer Will Liverman (Photo: Larrynx Photography)
Another Chicago-based composer who took part in in the project, Will Liverman, is best known as a baritone and has appeared in 14 productions at Lyric Opera of Chicago. His first big dive into composing came to fruition in 2023 with Lyric’s world premiere of Factotum, an opera he co-created with DJ King Rico, a producer, DJ, and multi-instrumentalist. It was among the first such offerings with an entirely BIPOC cast and creative team.
The visibility of that project led to other commissions, including his participation in Letters for Jackie with a three-and-a-half-minute song titled A Tribute to Mr. J.F.K. “I loved the concept,” he said, “and I’m a big advocate of being part of things that are new and innovative, projects that continue to push the art form forward.”
As he was first conceiving Letters for Jackie, Strand reached out to Kontorovitch, a staff pianist in the voice and opera program at Northwestern University, to be his collaborator. “She and I coach together,” he said. “We prepare things together. She played my master’s recital in 2014 with me. It just made the most sense to bring her on as someone I not only trust but that I continue to see as an inspiring individual.”
The 14 composers involved in the project had varying degrees of experience writing for voice and piano, and Strand and Kontorovitch worked with them to address any spots in the music that didn’t seem to work or to find ways to better emphasize important words in the text. “We were really able to fine-tune it,” he said. “So, now, the recital feels very much something that is ours.”
The Ravinia concert will come just eight days after the Sono Luminus label releases Dear Mrs. Kennedy, a recording of several selections from the program.
According to Kontorovitch, the Ravinia concert is the culmination of the first stage of the project, and two performers are hoping the visibility it generates will lead to further engagements elsewhere, perhaps even at similarly major venues. “It’s been an amazing journey,” she said. “It’s taken Ryan and me to physical places that I never dreamed of, like Montana. Every time we do a performance or talk about the recording, everybody comes up to us and has their personal story about how they remember the event [the assassination]. So, we’ve kind of built a community around this.”
As timely as it is to commemorate Kennedy and the momentous events surrounding his death, Thomas believes it also essential not to overlook the larger message of Letters to Jackie. “Grief and tragedy and loss are timeless,” she said. “One would like a project like this to feel universal and not just be about any one local moment in history.” ◼
Kyle MacMillan served as classical music critic for the Denver Post from 2000 through 2011. He currently freelances in Chicago, writing for such publications as the Chicago Sun-Times, Early Music America, Opera News, and Classical Voice of North America.