(Credit: Arielle Donson)

A brilliant new CD with soprano Laura Strickling, pianist Joy Schreier, and cellist Carrie Bean Stute, makes a touching and important poetic and musical statement about the condition of women in the contemporary world, with moving poetry, original compositions, and stellar performances. “LEGENDS: Rebellion” explores what it means to rebel politically, emotionally, erotically, maternally, and spiritually. These women resist, challenge, refuse, desire, protect, and redefine themselves.

OperaWire: I am looking forward to discussing your new album “LEGENDS: Rebellion,” which features music and poetry concerning women in mythology, the contemporary world, and especially Afghanistan. What led you to these poems and original settings?

Laura Strickling: I am forever on the hunt for two things: my next gown and my next song. I want to know who is composing songs today and what motivates them. When publisher Dennis Tobenski asked me to curate the “NewMusicShelf Soprano Anthology” in 2017, an entire world opened before me. I embarked on a months-long crash-course in contemporary composition, wading through hundreds of submissions and, in the process, developing strong opinions about what I find musically and textually compelling. When I sing, I have a front-row seat to the body language of an audience. I know almost immediately what they respond to – and how they respond to it. Much like my young daughter when I read her a bedtime story, their eyes light up when I get to the good part, or narrow when they encounter something challenging. I always consider audience experience in my programming. Yes, I need to love singing and performing the songs, but if I’m not communicating something that reaches the people listening then I’m not accomplishing anything lasting. I want to be the reason someone chooses to attend the next song recital they see advertised or buys the next song album that comes out. If I’m helping to build an audience for art song – not just for my own singing, but for the artform itself – then I’m doing my job.

This album began with the cornerstone of Juhi Bansal’s “Love, Loss, and Exile,” regarding poems by anonymous Afghan women. I zeroed in on what those songs represent at their core and searched for excellent repertoire that would reinforce, expand, and reframe those ideas. Composer Cecilia Livingston, her writing partner Duncan McFarlane, and I were already in process bringing to life a third song, “Circe,” joining “Kalypso” and “Penelope,” to complete an Odyssey-inspired triptych for my “40@40 Project” commissioning initiative. From that, the larger theme began to emerge: legends told through song and the long tradition of women carrying and transmitting culture through stories, both historical and mythological. Joy Schreier encountered Jens Ibsen through her work at the Washington National Opera. His song “Why won’t you let me look right at you?” reimagines the character of Death from the German literary tradition – famously explored musically by Schubert in “Death and the Maiden.” Ibsen employs that musical leitmotif to great effect while reversing the traditional power dynamic, placing the Maiden in a position of power over Death. I’ve long been an admirer of author Caitlin Vincent’s lyric and libretto work. She teamed up with another dear friend of mine, composer Jodi Goble, to create a devastating, surprisingly funny portrait of a single night in the life of a woman with her newborn baby with “Night-Time in the Fourth Trimester.” Then, in November 2024, I happened across a viral video of spoken-word poet Jocelyne Jam performing her miraculous poem “The Original Rebellion.” I reached out to her about having it set to music, facilitated a collaboration with composer Jasmine Barnes, and secured support for the project through New Music USA’s Creator Fund. With that, the perfect bookend to the program’s journey fell into place.

OW: You are accompanied by Joy Schreier (piano), and Carrie Bean Stute (cello). Did you make the decision for the arrangement or was that the composers’ choice?

LS: A brilliant student singer named Abigail Sinclair performed Juhi’s “Love, Loss, and Exile” for its SongFest commission premiere in June 2022. Juhi sent it to me shortly thereafter, so I was not involved during the creation of the cycle. We are dear friends and she knew I’d lived in Kabul from 2011-2014, so she suspected it would appeal to me – which is the understatement of the century. To quote the first song, these songs, “consume me like water, like fire.” I find them deeply compelling compositionally, textually, dramatically, and vocally – just incredibly beautiful. The inclusion of the cello is a stroke of brilliance. It serves in turn as atmospheric color, duet partner, harbinger of doom, funereal drone, and glint of hope.

OW: You are a remarkably accomplished singer, with great technique and vocal beauty. How did you make the choice for such an original collection of composers?

LS: I choose to work with composers who explore the seemingly endless expressive possibilities of the human voice, who themselves have distinct compositional perspectives, and who have a knack for finding texts that bring some important kernel of truth about the human experience to the fore. I want to be challenged.

OW: What do these composers, Juhi Bansal, Cecelia Livingston, Jens Ibsen, Jodi Goble, and Jasmine Arielle Barnes have in common that you chose to interpret them on your album?

LS: They all consistently demonstrate, through their compositions, a deep love for the human voice and for words and stories that matter. I’ve built genuine relationships with each of them through our various collaborations and have come to know them not only as artists working at the height of their talents, but as genuinely wonderful people. That matters a great deal to me.

OW: I found that the album offers a broad range of emotions including interesting vocal ornamentation, melismatic vocal sections, the use of straight tone, and some memorable poetry – “Your love is like water, like fire; The waves engulf me, the flames consume me.” Were you attracted to the poems first, or the music?

LS: The two are so inextricably entwined that I’m not sure I could say. In most cases, a song begins as a composer’s response to words of importance. In the best examples – and I would argue that every song on this album falls into that category – the music illuminates the text, helping listeners understand the words and the stories they carry more deeply, or perhaps in an entirely new way. Curating recital programs and albums gives me agency to tell stories I want to tell, whether song by song or through the intentional arc of a program or an album as a whole. If I encounter a song whose words I love, but whose musical setting doesn’t resonate with me, I might struggle to choose to sing it. In nearly every case, if I dislike – or fundamentally disagree with – the words, I actively won’t sing it. If I choose to say something, I mean it.

OW: There is great pain and sorrow in the Afghan women’s poems and songs. Almost too difficult to hear but beautifully captured by you, and the fine playing of Joy Schreier and Carrie Bean Stute. What comments did Joy and Carrie have during the preparation for the CD?

LS: I could not ask for better musical partners – or friends! – than Joy and Carrie. I’ve been working with Joy since 2009 and Carrie since 2015, and we had such a great time mining every expressive possibility in this extraordinary song cycle. Carrie and I put a great deal of thought into coordinating our vibrato throughout – when to match perfectly, when to diverge, and when to let loose. The interweaving duet in “Grief” required particular attention to matching articulation, phrasing, and color. Carrie and Joy spent a great deal of time carefully pacing the anxious, ominous rumble in “Stoning Ground,” which builds relentlessly before careening toward its frantic conclusion. I’ve also received a remarkable amount of feedback about listeners’ visceral reactions to the “seagull” effect Juhi asks the cellist to employ in the final song, both in live performance and on the recording. It’s such an evocative sound – unexpected, almost uncanny – and a wonderful example of how Juhi uses instrumental color not merely as accompaniment, but as an integral part of the storytelling.

OW: How did you prepare your singing for these unusual works? Did the composers coach the works or was the music notated in a way that communicated the vocal effects?

LS: Juhi’s score notations lay the groundwork: “This piece draws on a number of different vocal traditions, including Afghan folk singing and ornamentation from Hindustani classical singing. These styles use a variety of timbres, particularly those including heavier use of chest voice, no vibrato, scooping, slides, and other ornamentations not found in Western classical tradition. Although the piece can certainly be sung in a more typical Western classical voice, you are encouraged to use as much of these tones and colors as you are comfortable doing.” I wanted to make sure I was fully realizing Juhi’s vision for the piece, so I flew to California and spent three days in her living room experimenting. I then took that work back to my own studio, continuing to condition unfamiliar melismatic patterns, vowels, and vocal colors into my body. If I were to compare the process to a sport, it would be like a freestyle swimmer deciding to train for the butterfly. The fundamental mechanics aren’t entirely foreign, but the body has to learn to use muscles in unfamiliar ways until they become familiar, and that requires systematic work. It takes a shocking amount of air, for example, to sustain straight tone in the low-to-middle voice. It was enormously satisfying work. As a singer who has spent years training my voice to do very specific things in very specific ways, discovering that I could ask it to do something entirely different – and then train it until that new vocabulary felt natural – was exhilarating. I felt like I’d unlocked a new superpower.

For the Livingston/McFarlane, Ibsen/Bywaters, Goble/Vincent, and Barnes/Jam songs, I developed my vocal interpretations of the characters independently, with Joy at my side, and with producers Dan Merceruio and Marlan Barry continually encouraging me to trust my instincts in the recording space. Some of these works have already been taken up by other singers, and I love hearing how they bring their own artistic perspectives, instincts, and vocal abilities to the music. No two singers will tell the same story in quite the same way. Every performer brings something of themselves to the art – and that’s part of what keeps these works alive and how they enter the modern canon. Ultimately, that is one of my driving motivations for recording in the first place: to give new works a life beyond their premieres and help create the conditions for other artists to discover, interpret, and carry them forward.

OW: At first, I was not sure that I would like the pastiche nature of the music, combining classical, jazz, Eastern chant… Yet I was totally convinced by your performance and dedication to these compositions. The CD is an amazing accomplishment. What has been the response?

LS: It’s only been out for a week, but the response has been overwhelmingly positive. I especially love that everyone who has reached out has named a different favorite song. Not every song is going to speak to every listener – art is subjective – but my hope is that everyone can find one thing on this album that moves them. In choosing repertoire,
I strive for variety within my larger pursuit of excellence: songs and song cycles that are wildly different from one-another, but each exceptional in its own way. I seek to expand people’s understanding of what art song is and can be and whet their appetite for more.

OW: What is the meaning of the title of the album, “LEGENDS?”

LS: There is a double meaning in the title. Legends are stories – but the women telling these stories are also legends. In a sense, they become the stories themselves. I wanted to focus on the storytelling aspect of being a singer of songs. Across cultures and throughout history, song has been an important means of passing culture from person to person, and women have often played an essential role in carrying and transmitting those traditions. At the same time, women’s own stories have so often been taken out of their hands – retold, reshaped, or twisted by others. The women presented on “LEGENDS” remain at the center of their own stories and destinies. They are allowed to exist fully within this space and to tell us who they are on their own terms.

The reason the title has a subtitle – “Rebellion” – is, firstly, because I am a chronic over-programmer. There is simply too much amazing work that I want to share and wonderful composers I want to support! My original sketch for the project was a single, 40-track, double-disc album called “LEGENDS.” My team asked me to consider splitting the project into two parts for logistical reasons, and when I looked again at the works I had programmed, I realized that two very clear through-lines had emerged: Rebellion and Restoration. The words were already there in the repertoire itself: “The Original Rebellion” by Jasmine Barnes/Jocelyne Jam, and “Restoration” (from “Oh You Robot Saints!”) by Eric Malmquist/Rebecca Morgan Frank. “LEGENDS: Rebellion” explores what it means to rebel politically, emotionally, erotically, maternally, and spiritually. These women resist, challenge, refuse, desire, protect, and redefine themselves. “LEGENDS: Restoration” follows the other half of that arc. I’ll share more about it when the album comes out next year, but suffice it to say that it, too, finds its foundation in the art of storytelling.

OW: Juhi Bansal draws upon landay poetry, a generational oral tradition transmitted by women that focuses on the oppression of women. This is a human dilemma – when we know what women endure through societal dominance by men, how do we find ways of addressing the plight of women in Afghanistan?

LS: I’d first push back ever so slightly on the idea that landays focus on the oppression of Afghan women. The women who write landays are moved by the circumstances of their lives to respond through art, and hardship often demands expression. But there are countless landays on lighter subjects, including friendship, humor, and romance. The very first song in “Love, Loss, and Exile” is overtly positive: “Love” is a paean to being deliciously overwhelmed by passion. Afghan women are neither a monolith nor defined solely by their suffering; their lives encompass the same breadth of hope, desire, humor, intelligence, frustration, and resourcefulness as those of women anywhere else. “Stoning Ground,” however, is devastating. Honor killings still occur in Afghanistan. I can barely make it through the final three pages of music, during which a girl facing death by stoning repeatedly cries out to her mother. Every time I perform it, it takes an almost supernatural act of dissociation not to dissolve into a heap of weeping sadness and rage on the stage. The rest of the cycle’s emotional journey moves through “Grief” at the death of a lover; the profound loneliness of a woman in “Exile” from her homeland; and finally, “Tulip,” a preternatural expression of teenage anguish: “I’m like a tulip in the desert. I will die before I can open. And the waves of desert wind will scatter my petals.” These words are made even more devastating by the knowledge that their author was later the victim of an honor killing.

My husband was the founding director of the law school at the American University of Afghanistan, and we lived in Kabul from 2011 to 2014. I spent time in his classes, sitting alongside brilliant young women who were determined to participate fully in shaping the future of their country. I became friends with women in positions of leadership whose ability to participate in public life has since been severely curtailed by the Taliban’s return to power. Those experiences also taught me the limits of my own role. The future of Afghan women cannot be dictated from outside Afghanistan, and their struggle is not mine to lead or define. I am not a statesman or a diplomat – I am a singer. What I can do is use the skills and platform available to me to carry these words into spaces where they might not otherwise be heard, while keeping the agency, experiences, and authorship of Afghan women at the center. Juhi, who has her own personal connections to this subject matter, has expressed similar motivations for creating the work.

OW: Do you believe that your album will offer a catharsis to those who are fortunate-enough to listen to it?

LS: I have the world’s most perfect 10-year-old daughter, who makes every single day better than the one before it. I unreservedly love being her mother. But I was completely unprepared for the ways becoming a mother would reshape my identity. Breastfeeding is the single hardest thing I have ever done, and I say this as someone who has voluntarily chosen a career in classical music. My daughter didn’t sleep through the night for three years, and I never took a break from singing, so I was performing on the edge of disaster the entire time, which is a quaint little fact about our lives now that I have survived it. I could never have imagined how awful it is to need sleep so desperately while being consistently prevented from obtaining it. They use sleep deprivation as actual torture. When the perpetrator weighs nine pounds, we call it motherhood. So much about postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety is still poorly understood and insufficiently acknowledged by our culture. We simply accept that mothers will persevere through all of this, whatever the cost to themselves.

Sometimes knowing that you aren’t the only person who has struggled makes the journey a little lighter. When I read Caitlin’s account of this single night with her newborn, I recognized the raw truth of it and immediately felt a sense of camaraderie. I especially appreciate the humor – both textual and musical – that she and Jodi Goble bring to such a serious subject, because it is that deep. But sometimes, when you are awake at 3:47 a.m. with bleeding nipples and a tiny human who has decided that the concept of sleep applies only to other people, laughter is one of the few coping mechanisms still available to you. Ultimately, I think this song cycle can be enjoyed just as deeply by non-parents. We all connect with compelling stories and great art, even when the experiences they depict aren’t our own.