“For a good voice hearing is a torture.” This line from “Beethoven”—which I happened upon randomly when leafing through a collection of poetry at a Philadelphia bookstore—was my first introduction to the work of Robert Lowell (1917-1997). From this epigrammatic summation of Beethoven’s late style to his intimate confessions of his struggles with bipolar disorder, Lowell’s best lines strike at the center of things with an electrifying sense of precision.

A quintessential Bostonian of aristocratic origin, Lowell often used New England as the setting for his works. Of all his depictions of the area, I felt a strong kinship with his portrayal of a certain Boston kind of solitude: “The loneliness inside me is a place / Harvard where no one might always be someone. / When we’re alone people we run from change / to the mysterious and beautiful / I am eating alone at a small white table, / visible, ignored” (excerpt from “Eating Out Alone”).

“Lowell Études: Three Etchings on Solitude” traces its origins to the aforementioned lines, interwoven with remote resonances of Debussy’s “…De pas sur la neige…” (Prèludes, Book I, No. 6), a masterful exploration of acoustic space and memory.

This work, commissioned by Jihye Chang, received its in-person premiere on February 25, 2022 and its virtual premiere on May 27, 2021.

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