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.