If you look down the list of the dozens of classical pieces that Stacy Garrop has written in her 30-year career, you will find hardly any with generic titles. No Symphony No. 4, no Piano Trio in B-flat. Instead, the composer bills herself as a “musical storyteller,” and her latest commission, premiering in a pair of concerts August 2 at Ravinia, neatly embodies that idea. Titled Tracing Waves Across a Year, it draws on the ever-repeating yet never-identical cycle of four seasons that has captivated composers from Antonio Vivaldi to Astor Piazzolla.
Garrop’s inspiration was Lake Bluff writer Kathryn Haydon’s 2023 poetry collection Unsalted Blue Sunrise. For 12 months, Haydon ventured daily to Lake Michigan to write pieces that evoke the changing personality of the water. “Lake Michigan is always shifting on us,” says Garrop, an Evanston resident who also lives near the shore. “The colors are always different. Which is brighter, the sky or the water? Is the water calm, or is it really hitting the shore and sending up spray? What does it sound like?”
Garrop, 56, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she was a member of the high school marching band and choir. She discovered her love for composing in AP Music Theory: “It was like a light bulb turned on in a room in my head that I had never seen illuminated before, and then I couldn’t find the off switch.”
Her graduate studies took her to the University of Chicago, where she studied under Pulitzer Prize winner Shulamit Ran, and then to Indiana University’s well-regarded music school. After completing her doctorate there in 2000, she landed a teaching post at Roosevelt University and settled into the classical music scene here.
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One of the biggest turning points of Garrop’s career came in 2016, when she made the “terrifying” decision, as she puts it, to give up that regular paycheck and earn a living solely from composing — a rarity in the profession. Says Garrop: “I finally figured out, Oh, I will have massive regrets if I don’t take a risk on myself.” Since then, she’s enjoyed a string of successes, winning commissions from the United States Navy Band, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, and other notable organizations.
What drives Garrop artistically is her innate curiosity. “With every piece, there is a chance to do something I’ve never done before,” she says. She’s peered inside the love story of a Supreme Court justice and traced the space travels of a NASA astronaut, finding a new musical language each time. “Sometimes those stories are very tonal and lyrical, and other times they’re not. I wrote a piece called Forging Steel for the Pittsburgh Symphony, and when you’re throwing elements into a blast furnace, you don’t want tonality. You want chaos.”
While Garrop points to classical stalwarts Dmitri Shostakovich and George Crumb as her lodestars, she grew up loving Broadway musicals and rock. Today, she’s a big fan of the K-pop group BTS, about as far from her compositional realm as you can get — and that’s the point. She even plans to attend the group’s Soldier Field concert in August. “That’s how serious I am,” she says.
Her new work will be presented as part of a multimedia program at Ravinia called Lakenotes: Seasons of Lake Michigan, performed by the local Black Moon Trio. Each of Tracing Waves’ four movements will be introduced by a Haydon poem, and the music will be paired with imagery by Chicago-based nature photographer Lincoln Schatz.
It was Parker Nelson, the Black Moon hornist, who approached Garrop last year about writing the anchor piece for the event. The chamber trio’s unusual instrumentation — French horn, violin, and piano — is a “tricky combination,” Garrop notes. She studied previous examples of the grouping, including an 1865 opus by Johannes Brahms. One of her challenges was making sure the horn didn’t overpower the softer sound of the violin.
“The process of giving a beginning, middle, and end to a very open-ended story is something she is incredibly good at,” says Nelson, who’s known Garrop for a decade. “That is something we were hoping we would be able to showcase, and it sure seems like we did.”