Advice to a Girl (2020)

6 minutes
for Soprano (or Mezzo Soprano) with String Quartet

Commissioned with funding assistance from Arts SA.

First performance by Bethany Hill (Soprano), Cameron Hill (Violin I), Helen Ayres (Violin II), Martin Alexander (Viola), and Ewen Bramble (Cello) on October 11th, 2020 at ‘Chamber Music at the Top House’, Coriole Winery, McLaren Vale, South Australia.

Advice to a Girl is the title track from my 2022 album, released through ABC Classic. Discover more and purchase the CD through Bandcamp.

This work is also available in an arrangement for Voice and Piano Trio, and for Voice and Piano.

​I became aware of the poem 'Advice To A Girl' by Sara Teasdale in a media misquote, which said I had set these words in another musical work of mine, ‘Flame and Shadow’ (they got the Teasdale bit right, but chose the wrong poem!) Upon reading the poem, it struck me as the perfect text to use for a work that wanted to lay claim to a woman's rightful desire to create. I set it aside until the right opportunity came about- that opportunity was a new work to be included on my debut album of chamber music for voice and strings.
 
The music, like the text, is gentle but confident; simple, but direct. Teasdale’s honest and unpretentious lyricism is reflected in the crystalline clarity of the music, beginning with a small waver of insecurity, and finishing with a new-found assuredness. It is a poem that I still struggle to articulate a meaning for, but which affects me deeply every time I hear it: what better reason, then, to set it to music, and to let the music deliver the true meaning of the words?
 
Anne Cawrse © 2021
​
Advice to a Girl
by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
 
No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed;
Lay that on your heart,
My young angry dear;
This truth, this hard and precious stone,
Lay it on your hot cheek,
Let it hide your tear.
Hold it like a crystal
When you are alone
And gaze in the depths of the icy stone.
Long, look long and you will be blessed:
No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed.
REVIEW
"Cawrse musically imbues the opening with the poem’s simplicity, in part using a drone-based riff over which Bethany Hill overlays the beautiful melody. There is great confluence in this song between melodic line and accompaniment, despite the gathering string complexity and tonal shifts. The composer musically depicts the various textures and their interaction portrayed in the poem – skin against stone, hot against cold, hard against soft. But the ending reverts in a different form, to the simplicity of the opening, because these repeated lines in their essential truth, convey all that needs to be known."

-Mandy Stefanakis, for Music Trust
(read the full review here)