Dear singers,

Last week, my husband came to visit me while I was on a gig in Florida.

He asked how much money I was making on this concert, and when I told him, he joked, "That's a LOT for 8 hours of work!"

It really was a joke - he couldn't be more supportive or appreciative of me and my work - but I got to thinking about all of the behind-the-scenes labor it takes to bring music to performance.

Rehearsals, practice, listening, lessons, technical work, translation . . .

We are paid (or not!) for the result of all those hours, days, and weeks of effort, but the visible work only lasts a few short minutes, maybe an hour or two.

It reminded me of a beautiful passage I read about the practice of "veiling the bowl" - covering a bowl of dough with a cloth so the leavening can act before the loaf is ready to bake.

The bowl has to be covered and left to do its work - we can't chivvy it along or shorten its duration without sacrificing the quality of the final product.

The author used this metaphor in explaining the significance of the veil in Greek mythology - how goddesses would wear veils when they wanted to work among mortals without detection.

The veil was not a sign of concealment or shame, but of work in progress - work that was not yet ready for public view.

When we musicians present a fully baked song or concert, we are completing only the final revelation of a long arc of work, most of which happens on our own, music in hand, "under the veil."

On the one hand, this idea of veiled work reminded me of one of my motivations for creating the Weekly Warm-Up.

I want to reveal how I'm doing the work - musical, technical, and mental - to give you a little leavening to add to your own bowl.

But I also felt the urge to pull back the veil on the big project I've been working on for years now - my album, which releases March 20th.

Now that it's just about ready to come out of the oven, I would like to tell you what this project, which is so special to me, has been doing under the veil for the last decade.

(This might take some time, so if you'd rather just skip to the album details, they are here, or the schedule of performances is here and we would love to see you there!).

In 2012, at a summer art song program, I had the chance to work with William Bolcom, the American composer best known for his Cabaret Songs.

There, I heard a cycle of his called Briefly It Enters - 9 settings of poems by Jane Kenyon, and I was powerfully moved by the poems and music, particularly by the fourth song, Otherwise.

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

I sent a score to Tanya Blaich, my dear friend and recital partner, who I first met when she was assigned to accompany my voice lessons at New England Conservatory 25 years ago.

Since graduation, we had moved apart geographically but still created opportunities to make music together as often as we could.

I told Tanya I thought these Bolcom songs might be for us.

Over the next few years, when we would get together for recitals of Debussy or Schubert, we would steal a few minutes of rehearsal time to read through the Bolcom songs.

We would discuss the poems over breakfast, and quote them to each other by text between visits.

We became more and more attached to this beautiful song cycle, and started to imagine it might be the core material of a future album recording.

The songs are about the rituals of daily life - dog walking, meals at home, the changing flora of the garden at poet Jane Kenyon's home, Eagle Pond Farm.

Bolcom's settings are tailored to the poetry with incredible precision, and we learned that he and Jane selected the poems together in the final year of her life. She died from leukemia in 1995 at the age of 45.

As Tanya and I learned more about Jane's life and poetry, we began to appreciate Bolcom's song cycle not only as a celebration of the minutiae of domestic life, but as a powerful memento mori - because Jane knew her time was limited, even the beautiful small moments of her life became sacred rituals.

It was especially powerful to experience and slowly grapple with this poetry at this particular point of our lives and friendship - over the course of decades, Tanya and I had seen one another through weddings, divorce, deaths, births, diagnoses, second opinions, and the aging of our parents.

As now-middle-aged women for whom life seemed to be getting ever more "real," we felt Jane's keen appreciation of the present moment in the face of the inevitable.

We started to look for repertoire that could partner on an album with Briefly It Enters, but everything we found seemed . . . well, TOO focused on death, too tragic.

Life is unquestionably the subject of Jane's poetry - death just raises the stakes.

We kept looking.

In March of 2024, we were invited by New England Conservatory, our alma mater and Tanya's current workplace, to offer a program of songs by Charles Ives as part of an evening celebrating his legacy.

Ives, the iconoclastic American composer, wrote hundreds of songs but did not arrange them into cycles, so we decided to form a group based on our own tastes.

Tanya and I sent lists of titles back and forth, and eventually came up with a list of 9 mutual favorites.

On the face of it, these songs had nothing to do with Bolcom. They're about parades, grocery stores, old hymns, and religion. It seemed like a fun project, but unrelated to our "veiled bowl."

We shuffled our 9 songs into an order that would create a flow of keys and tempi.

And eventually, we were surprised to find that a narrative had emerged - a theme of deep patriotism grounded in the rituals of family, church, and town.

It seemed that these Ives songs actually could partner with the Bolcom on an album, with the focus shifted slightly from memento mori to the rituals that make life meaningful.

We just needed a third piece to round it out.

Later that spring, when I was digging through some songs of Reynaldo Hahn to assign to my students, I came across his Études Latines.

I was struck by the unusual poetry of this set, by Parnassian French poet Charles Marie René Leconte deLisle.

The narrating voice of the Études is that of a mature lover experiencing, in suffering and ecstasy, his last great love. The setting is an idealized mash-up of ancient Greece and Rome, and the dominant leitmotif of the set is wine - what's not to like?

The songs are rich in tempting sensual detail - a stark contrast in style to the somewhat more blunt Ives and spare Bolcom.

And with their theme of enjoying love in the evening of life, the tone was consistent with the Bolcom.

We had found our program, and at this point, we started the real accelerated work of the last two years.

In our metaphorical baking process, this was the "doubling in size" stage.

Totally apart from hiring the engineer, the producer, finding a label, and learning and memorizing the 26 songs, here is a list of just some of the rabbit trails we went down in our research:

• Wine references in the Odes of Horace
• British abolitionist poetry
• Cloth-dyeing in ancient Greece and Rome (NB: snails are involved!)
• Tent-revivals
• World War I patriotic songs
• Alchemists of history
• Identification of plants: timothy, vetch, sedges, peonies, milkweed

We also fostered a new and delightful friendship with Mary Lyn Ray, who lovingly tends Jane Kenyon's legacy at Eagle Pond Farm.

We asked if we might visit the farm to see the things Jane wrote about and were struck not only by the beauty of the place, but by Mary Lyn's incredible sympathy and support for our project.

Nearly all the photos in the album cover and booklets (as well as this letter) were taken at the farm, with Mary Lyn just outside the shot at the photographer's elbow.

Summer of 2025 started the period of baking - an intensive week of rehearsal in June, followed by three performances, the photoshoot at Jane's farm, and finally in August, three days of recording in beautiful Jordan Hall back at NEC.

I thought we were done.

Ha!

That was the easy part.

All this year, while seeming to go about my normal life of family and teaching and gigs, I've been under the veil, listening to hours and hours of edits and all the while, writing the notes and translations for the booklet, which ended up at a whopping 58 pages.

I have hardly felt like a veiled goddess walking secretly among mortals - more like an over-proofed loaf submitting to a prolonged session under the broiler!

But now, after countless layouts and mockups and spreadsheets and phone calls, here we are, finally, finally pulling the bread from the oven.

I tell you all this not to brag, although I am very, very proud of the work that Tanya and I and a big team of other people have done.

But however well it turned out, there's no way anyone can know how much care and time and work went into this five-inch square object we created, and actually, all that time under the veil was the very best part.

That's why I want to tell you about it.

So if you've made it this far, thank you SO much for your support. It feels so good to tell a friend.

Big veiled hugs,

Laura