‘All these little things’: UMass professor’s new album showcases female poets’ works set to music

A local college professor is amplifying the works of female American poets through art song. 

Mary Hubbell, a professor of voice at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, released her new album, “ALL THESE LITTLE THINGS,” on Friday, March 6. The compilation “explores life’s big existential questions through a woman’s lens, setting late 19th- and early 20th-century poetry by women as intimate, expressive art song,” according to a press release.

The album, which was recorded at Bezanson Recital Hall at the Bromery Center for the Arts, features the works of poets Sara Teasdale, Josephine Heard, Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mary Weston Fordham, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Georgia Douglas Johnson are set to music.

The project — Hubbell’s second album — traces its roots to the eve of the COVID-19 lockdowns. At the time, Hubbell was teaching at Smith College and contacted the late Ronald Perera, a retired Smith professor and composer, to write a vocal piece for her. When Perera asked for a poem to serve as his muse, Hubbell chose Teasdale’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which is about nature’s ability to continue existing even if the human race destroys itself in a world war.

Later that year, Perera gave her a surprise: he’d composed two more pieces for her that were also based on Teasdale’s poems. In 2022, Hubbell’s husband, composer Gregory Brown, also set three poems to music for her to perform. These collaborations sparked a larger vision: Hubbell commissioned composers Alice Jones and Sarah Rimkus to set more women-penned poetry to music, completing the track list for the full-length collection.

“It just became a project that I wanted to sink my teeth into,” Hubbell said.

Hubbell said she finds it difficult to name a favorite track, but notes that “I Shall Go Back Again” — based on a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay — is among the most satisfying to perform. The piece concludes a triptych of poems tracing the arc of a breakup, beginning with “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied” and “Ebb.”

In “I Shall Go Back Again,” however, the narrator has worked through her breakup grief and details a plan to build a new life for herself — literally and figuratively — in the wake of what happened: “nevermore / Shall I return to take you by the hand; I shall be gone to what I understand, / And happier than I ever was before.”

“It’s very satisfying, as a story, to tell the whole set,” Hubbell said.

Art song, as Hubbell defined it, is “a piece of poetry first” and is a type of vocal performance designed for smaller venues than concert halls or opera houses. Art songs feature a singer and a pianist and are often written in Romance or Germanic languages. 

“There’s something very intimate about art song,” Hubbell said. “It feels like you can really directly connect with the music, the words and your audience, which is so satisfying.”

Hubbell also said it was important to platform female poets in this way to give them space in a genre that has long been dominated by male composers and writers.

“In the classical music world, most composers are male, and that’s changing, of course, which is great, and a lot of the poetry is changing as well,” she said. “But I found when I was training, I felt … ‘Wow, I’m really singing a lot of songs about love and death and longing, and it’s all written by men, and often the texts are by men. And so as I got older, I started to think, ‘How can I express a point of view that’s maybe something I might be a little bit closer to?’

“There’s something about the text being by a woman, for me, that makes me feel like I can communicate the story really well,” she added.

Next week, Hubbell travels to Chicago as a guest artist at Electronic Music Midwest Festival. Rather than electronic dance music (EDM), the event focuses on avant-garde works that integrate vocal performance with technology. It’s a stylistic departure from her typical classical repertoire, but she studied music in that style when she studied music in Europe, so she sees it as a way of “getting back to my roots.”

“There’s a new music world out there that’s kind of niche and weird. It’s sort of the weirdest music, the strangest ideas, but I’ve always enjoyed it. I feel very free, as a singer, because there’s not a preconceived notion of what I’m supposed to sound like,” she said. “It’s very different music, and I like that world a lot.”

After that, she’ll be performing her new album live at Otter Creek Music Festival in Vermont in April. There, she hopes other singers will be inspired to perform the music themselves.

“I want this music to have legs, as they say; it’s not all mine just because I recorded [it],” she said. “I want there to be more interpretations — other pianists and singers taking it up and performing it all over the place. That would make me feel great.”

For more information about Mary Hubbell, visit maryhubbell.com. To stream the album, visit lnk.fuga.com/maryhubbell_alltheselittlethings.