In May 2001 composer Stacy Garrop was at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, working on an orchestral piece she called Shadow. Garrop, who teaches composition at Roosevelt University, was only 31, but she’d already won numerous prizes for her compositions, and they were being played more often around the country. She calls it a watershed year. Toward the end of her month at Yaddo she left for two days to attend a performance of one of her chamber pieces in New York City, and while she was there she ran into someone who reminded her of the first person she’d ever fallen in love with.
Garrop had started taking piano lessons when she was six, but her stepfather refused to let her play piano at home. She kept taking lessons but rarely practiced. Her high school had an unusually good music department, and in her freshman year she played bells in the orchestra and sang in the choir. As a sophomore she played in the marching and concert bands, sang in the choir, and began playing saxophone. There were rehearsals, performances, and competitions, all of which kept her out of the house.
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In her junior year she took an AP music class. “It was taught by a jazz trumpeter, who told us all to go home and write some pieces,” she says. “I started composing and discovered that I really liked it.” A family friend knew Bay Area composer H. David Hogan, and he took her on as a student. He started by teaching her about 12-tone and serial music. “He wanted to open up my boundaries as fast as he could. He gave me tons of CDs to listen to and threw all kinds of different musical styles at me to try to compose in. It really gave me a way to put something down on paper about my emotions and everything that was going on with the remarriage that I couldn’t say to anybody out loud.” She says that when she listens to those early pieces now she can hear what she was trying to get at. “I didn’t know really how to express anguish that well, but it’s the best I could express what I was feeling inside.” That same year her mother divorced her stepfather.
Garrop decided on Indiana University at Bloomington, where she knew she could continue studying ethnomusicology and get teaching experience. “It’s such a large performance school, and they offered me a teaching assistantship,” she says. “By the time I left I had four years of teaching under my belt–I taught two years of theory, two years of composition.”
In the fall of 2000 Garrop became an assistant professor at Roosevelt. “This was my first job and my only interview,” she says. “I felt that Indiana had really prepared me for it.” But her teaching load left little time for composing during the school year. “I’d love to be composing full-time,” she says. “As much as I love teaching, I’d love to be living in the music constantly. I envy the time my students have to compose–they’d probably laugh if they heard me say that.”
