As the Shadow to the Body
Four songs for Soprano and Piano
Text by Angelina Weld Grimké
2024
Ah! It is good to be alive, good to Love!
As the Shadow to the Body is a song cycle all about recognizing, appreciating, and celebrating the small things—a sunrise, a blade of grass, the tears of another, and the effect just being around someone can have on another. The cycle sets four text from a fellow Massachusetts poet, journalist, playwright, and abolitionist, Angelina Weld Grimké.
I stumbled upon her work on accident, thanks to researching a different abolitionist poet, Phyllis Wheatley. Upon reading the poem that would soon become the final song of this cycle, “Paradox,” I immediately fell in love with Grimké’s succinct, almost tangible writing style. Her use of natural subjects, of shared experiences, and of seemingly small observations creates these small universal experiences.
The cycle revolves around six pitches, set class (024579), heard most prominently right at the start of the final song. Each song is built around this set class and the completion of the aggregate, which is the same set class but the other six pitches. The order of pitches heard at the beginning of the final song is the “home base,” of which other melodies are inverted, transposed, reversed, or otherwise altered. Sometimes, both sets are heard together creating discord and disconnections. Other times, fragments of the class are heard, leaving the seeking for the other pitches.
In doing this, the set class becomes that small, unappreciated thing. It underlies the beauty, the pain, and the places in between. It becomes the connective fiber that tangles shared humanity to nature, peace to discord. Each song is an experience that can be shared by so many people—or at least Grimké and I share them all. That linking and sharing of experience is exactly what the cycle aims to capture.
The piece was premiered in 2025 by Soprano Alex Berget and Pianist Alex Alden, and performed again in 2026 by Pianist Mary Helen Graveman, with Megan LaBelle-Smith singing. The picture above features the latter performance, and both recordings are featured to the right.
