| Summary: | Stacy Garrop is an emerging composer of choral and orchestral music. The focus of this research is to provide information on her career and compositional style and to provide a conductors analysis of six multi-movement a cappella works which set to music sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Works to be examined:
Sonnets of Love and Chaos (2001)
Sonnets of Vanity, Loss, and Rapture (2002)
Sonnets of War and Mankind (2003)
Sonnets of Desire, Longing, and Whimsy (2004)
Sonnets of the Fatal Interview (2005)
Sonnets of Beauty and Music (2006)
The document is divided into nine chapters tracing the musical development of Stacy Garrop from the beginning of her musical education in elementary school to her current position as Associate Professor of Composition at Roosevelt University, and identifies influential musical moments in her career while providing insight into her compositional process. Furthermore, the document traces the career of Pulitzer Prize winning feminist American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. The focus of the monograph is to analyze the aforementioned choral works with consideration to formal structure, style, interpretation, and rehearsal considerations.
Garrop sonnet settings are composed with Millays texts in mind. Meter is typically altered to allow for proper syllabic stress of the English language. Within each movement, careful attention is given to musically express the words of the sonnet. Garrops harmonic language is largely chromatic and is constructed around anchor pitches, often tonicized by duration or repetition rather than traditional cadential figures.
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