For the Love of Music

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.”