JULIANA HALL | AMERICAN ART SONG COMPOSER

THROUGH THE GUARDED GATE

THROUGH THE GUARDED GATE
5 Songs for Mezzo-Soprano and Piano

on Poems by Margaret Widdemer

Publisher
E. C. Schirmer Music Company

Catalog Number
8728

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Description
THROUGH THE GUARDED GATE is one of Juliana Hall’s works that most overtly speaks to how our society treats our children, and how women have struggled – and continue to struggle – to take their rightful place as men’s equals. It was commissioned by the Seattle Art Song Society to be performed on a concert of songs related to women’s issues held as part of the 2019 season’s theme of social justice.

Having never written such a piece, Hall was at a loss where to find a text…but she discovered a poet new to her, an American poet named Margaret Widdemer. Although Widdemer shared one of the earliest Pulitzer Prizes in Poetry with Carl Sandburg in the early twentieth century, she is virtually unknown to today’s readers. Her poems are wonderful, and she has written quite a few that pointedly deal with issues of social justice in her time a hundred years ago…issues that, sadly, are still with us a century later.

The five songs that comprise “Through The Guarded Gate” discuss how we turn our eyes away from the exploitation and trafficking of our daughters, how men in power send our sons to war never to return for the sole purpose of acquiring money and power, how the women in the early suffragist movement gave up so much in order that subsequent generations might enjoy political power through the right of women to vote, how the modern woman has decided not to play second fiddle to her lover but is asserting her equality in the realm of the romantic relationship, and finally, a march that demands that women be allowed “through the guarded gate” that men for so long have kept closed to women…the gate through which one reaches positions of power and opportunity, through which one is “allowed” to make a mark on the world.

Text
1 – The Net
2 – A Mother to the War-Makers
3 – The Old Suffragist
4 – The Modern Woman to Her Lover
5 – The Women’s Litany

Vocal Range
B 3  :  A 5

Duration
19′ 00″

Vocal Tessitura
F 4  :  D 5

Commission
Seattle Art Song Society

First Performance
March 8, 2019
Seattle Art Song Society
Ballard First Lutheran Church
Seattle, Washington

Year of Composition
2018

First Performers
Clara Osowski, mezzo-soprano
Juliana Hall, piano

Listen
Clara Osowski, mezzo-soprano
Juliana Hall, piano

1 – The Net

2 – A Mother to the War-Makers

3 – The Old Suffragist

4 – The Modern Woman to Her Lover

5 – The Women’s Litany