For the Love of Music

“Music is my lifeline,” says composer Edie Hill. “Composing is a way to reach deep down to summon up the beast I have in me. Music has been a vehicle, my way of working through different kinds of life, grappling with mortality.” As she talks, her eyes sparkle and her whole face lights up, giving her a childlike, pixyish quality.

But music is also Hill’s job. She isn’t a household name yet, but the forty-four-year-old is a well-known composer-in-residence with the Schubert Club who can make a living working strictly on commission, a rare feat for a composer. Her commissions can range from three-minute choral pieces to full-length orchestral compositions, and she typically completes several every year. She’s currently working on ten commissions, about as many as she can handle at one time, which offer an element of security in a notoriously tenuous profession.

“She’s been around here, plugging away, for more than ten years, and now she’s being successful,” says Schubert Club executive director Bruce Carlson, who’s been an advocate for her work for more than a decade. “Now you hear her music quite a bit.”

Hill’s masterful facility for setting words and exploiting the emotional richness of texts keeps her in demand most as a composer of choral music. She’s had works performed locally by the Rose Ensemble, the Dale Warland Singers, VocalEssence, Cantus, and Dare to Breathe, and nationally by the Camerata Singers and Harmonium Choral Society.

Musically speaking, Hill wears her heart on her sleeve, which is serving her well with one of her current projects, a commission for the Rose Ensemble to commemorate its tenth anniversary. According to the early music group’s website, this month’s concert focuses on “centuries of medieval and Renaissance music written in honor of the world’s first ecologist,” St. Francis of Assisi. Hill’s contribution is a setting of his poem Il Cantico Delle Creature (Canticle of the Creatures), a celebration of the natural world. “I love the text,” says Hill. “It is so pertinent with the earth and the state that it’s in. I can sing things out, through the Rose Ensemble, straight from my heart.”

Hill’s studio is the front room of the south Minneapolis house she shares with her husband, playwright Jon Wolf. A worktable, bigger than most dining tables, is cluttered with papers, pencils, CDs, a calendar, and a coffee pot. A studio upright stands next to the table, and her current manuscripts—handwritten even in this era of computers—cover the walls. “I tack drafts up like paintings,” she says. “They give me perspective.” But her studio also reflects her sense of fun and whimsy. “I love my space,” she says. “I have things I love around me—shells, a picture of my grandma, my collection of glass eggs.”

When at home, Hill maintains a rigorous composing regimen. She rises around 5 a.m., and, after cooking egg whites and steamed apples and carrots for her two dogs, works until 5 or 6 p.m., and sometimes until 8. She eats breakfast, lunch, and occasionally dinner in her studio. She wraps her landline phone in a towel in the basement so it doesn’t disturb her. But she keeps her cell phone in her studio and answers it with more regularity because only a few people have the number. Still, she’s set the ringer to croak like a frog for a more benign interruption. If her dogs didn’t need a couple of walks a day, she doubts she’d get outside much.

When traveling, which Hill does more than eight weeks a year, she spreads her scores around her on the bed so when she wakes up, they’re ready for her to work on. “The music is in my head all the time,” she says. “I dream about it. I get a lot of work done when I’m sleeping.”

Hill is lucky that her husband is also a creative artist and understands her drive and commitment. “He is steady,” she says. “He knows my life is all about music, and he lets me do that. My work comes first, even when I miss family gatherings. He’s nothing but supportive.”

Hill surmises that much of her intensity comes from surviving breast cancer more than ten years ago, when she was thirty-two and finishing her PhD in composition and music theory at the University of Minnesota. “Chemo is a life-changing experience,” she says. “It flips everything. Most people slow down as a result. But for me, it was a launching pad. ‘It kicked you into gear,’ my mom says. Life is short. I wanted to seize it and go do what I wanted to do.”

Hill hasn’t talked publicly about her cancer before, largely because she doesn’t want to be pitied. “Back then, I was applying for my first Bush Fellowship,” she says. “I didn’t want to get a pity grant”—she received the fellowship in 1999—“but this far out, it’s safe to talk about it.”

From her earliest days, even since elementary school, Hill survived the world with music. She was born in New York City and attended a stringent private girls’ school where, she says, she “struggled to get Cs. I had dyslexia, but in those days, they didn’t know what that was. I took solace in the world of music. I would sit down at the piano and compose, all by ear. I don’t know what I would have done without music.”

Her family moved to Connecticut, and she attended public high school there. But music remained the focus of her life. “At that point, I wanted to be Judy Collins or Joni Mitchell,” she says. “I wrote a lot of ballads, which I sang and played. I was even a lounge singer for a while.”

Her world opened up even more when she attended Bennington College in Vermont. “I was around a lot of creative people,” she says. “There, my dyslexia didn’t matter. It was the first place I felt comfortable in my own skin.” Bennington’s music program, which included weekly sessions for working on compositions with performers, convinced her that composing was the career for her.

It was also at Bennington that she met her husband, a native of Northfield, Minnesota, and, through him, that she came to the Twin Cities. While an undergraduate, she interned with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra at the same time the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts was opening. “I was blown away by the theater and the music here,” she says. “And the winter.” She had her belongings shipped to the Twin Cities almost immediately.

In 1997, Hill received her first commission from the Schubert Club for an instrumental piece. The Schubert Club commissioned Canticle for the Rose Ensemble, so Hill feels a sense of coming full circle. Working with the Rose Ensemble is also a sort of homecoming for Hill, who was the ensemble’s first composer-in-residence, from 1999 to 2000, three years after Jordan Sramek founded the group after he’d organized a couple of successful ad hoc concerts. “Starting a group was the furthest thing from my mind,” recalls Sramek, who had moved to the Twin Cities after studying early music at St. Scholastica in Duluth. “I really just wanted to sing.”

It might seem contradictory for an ensemble renowned for creating historically accurate performances of ancient music to feature a new work in practically every concert, but that is part of the Rose Ensemble’s eclectic vision. “Our principal focus is early music,” says Sramek, “but when we commission new music, we work almost exclusively with Minnesota composers who are familiar with our work.”

Hill remains engaged in her ongoing relationship with the ensemble. “The first time I heard them, I knew they were going to take off and I was right,” she says. “It’s wonderful to watch them grow. I am so proud of Jordan.”

For all her creativity, Hill is also a savvy businesswoman. She started her own publishing company, Hummingbird Press, to handle requests for her music and works hard to secure commissions by attending conventions and introducing herself to people all over the country. At a recent Chamber Music America convention, for example, she set up her table next to the table of a violinmaker. By the end of the convention, he wanted to commission a piece for a string quartet from her. (They’re currently negotiating a contract.) “Being nice is the only way to do things,” says Hill. “It’s important to be gracious. [This business] is hard enough without tantrums.”

But she’s also a tough negotiator. “I have to be. It’s how I pay my mortgage,” she says. “I let people know I work hard for my money. But when you’re a really nice person, people tend to give you what you want. I feel guilty about that sometimes. But after I do a piece and know how hard I worked on it, I don’t feel guilty anymore.”

For all her confidence and years of experience, Hill is still prone to acute bouts of insecurity and goes so far as to keep her old orchestration textbook, filled with practical notes for composers, on her worktable as a resource. “When I get overwhelmed, I begin to feel like a hack, like I don’t deserve the success I’m having,” she says. “But I’ve been doing this professionally for almost twenty years! When am I going to get over the idea that the last success was a fluke?”

Hill has no such anxieties about Canticle. “I am lucky that I get to work on things so close to my heart,” says Hill, who, when she finds a spider in the house, relocates it to the backyard instead of squashing it.

Before she started composing Canticle, she says, “My brother-in-law, who is Italian, read the text to me, and I began to hear the music. I got caught up in the worlds of the words and spun with them.” 

William Randall Beard writes about choral music and opera for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.