Questions for Raechel Sherwood: Before the Show (Nathan Hall)

Some Questions for Raechel Sherwood: Before the Show (Nathan Hall)

CU undergraduate composer Raechel Sherwood premieres her work BOSS tomorrow night, written for string quartet and performed by the College of Music’s Tesla Quartet. I asked Raechel to share some insight into her piece, and what she was thinking in the moments leading up to its performance. I also told her I would be back again after the concert to check in, seeing if any of her thoughts or feelings about the piece changed.

Sherwood is very active in the theatre scene, and primarily works in theatrical and musical genres. For the last Pendulum concert, Raechel wrote and performed a short solo monologue with the working title ‘Boxes’, focusing on the minutiae of every day life and our struggles to comprehend and conveniently organize our existence. Similarly theatrical in origin, BOSS began its life as an on-stage accompaniment to a one-act play, a sectional piece used for incidental music. The work, she tells me, “was inspired by the message of the play which brought attention to the mundane-ness of life and the endless cycle that our lives seem to fall into, regardless of how often we make plans to break from it.” This year Sherwood reworked the piece into a through-composed quartet that “still attempts to takes the audience on the journey to find meaning behind what they do every day.”

Some of Pendulum’s most exciting concerts feature performances by the Tesla Quartet. Formed of graduate string players, the group is one of the premiere ensembles in the College of Music and has been making national and international waves. Sherwood tells me that working and rehearsing her piece with ‘the Teslas’ has been a pleasure, as the quartet has “brought a musicality to this piece and lifted the notes off the page even in our first rehearsal together.”

While Sherwood was up to the tasks of re-composing a work for an intimidatingly talented ensemble, a new audience, and a new context, she still found it a challenge to think of the piece as fresh. Will the work have the same effect for its listeners without the integration of the spoken word of the play from which it came? (Raechel welcomes any feedback from the audience and her fellow colleagues if you decide to let her know.) The piece will be an experiment that Sherwood hopes will enlighten future collaborations in theatre, refining her own personal style along the way.