About the creation

In 1979 I was commissioned by WFMT, Chicago's Fine Arts Radio Station, to write a song cycle for inclusion in a nine-part radio series examining the 20th century art song. It was my initial intention to group together a number of poems, when I came across "Apprehensions" by Sylvia Plath. Written in the last year of her life, it is the first poem in the Winter Trees collection. What immediately struck me upon reading it was what I perceived of as the musical suggestiveness of the poem's central idea and formal plan: in four stanzas, the colors white, gray, red and black are used as a metaphor for the metamorphosis of a state of mind. Each stanza is rich with powerful imagery, ranging from the eerie to the intensely violent.

More than an opportunity to paint color in sound - an attractive but, in and by itself, not exactly an original impulse - the poem's format hinted at the possibility of great contrast between movements, held together and propelled forward by one central idea. The overall shape of a gradual ascent to a horrific climax culminating in a steep fall was one I found myself drawn to enormously, leading me to treat the work as a kind of a "mini-opera", consisting of three "acts", or movements, followed by an "aftermath", or an epilogue. Toward that end I added a clarinet (to me an instrument which can be closely linked to the human voice), as a kind of "alter ego", to the more conventional pairing of voice and piano.

My increased concern at the time of composing Apprehensions for the control of thematic transformation, coupled with contrapuntal thinking, allowed me a greater economy in the use of compositional materials and a new freedom of expression.

Shulamit Ran