Emily Levin, Principal Harpist at Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Composes a Musical Community
Emily Levin, principal harp for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Credit: Dario Acosta.
Emily Levin, principal harp at Dallas Symphony Orchestra, is also the Artistic Director of Fine Arts Chamber Players in Dallas. The Bronze Medal Winner of the 9th USA International Harp Competition, Levin teaches as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Harp in Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. Charming and elfin in person, her playing is likewise ethereal–both grounded and soaring, creating new magical soundscapes to explore. Classical Recording Foundation named her their 2017 Young Artist of the Year after the release of her debut album Something Borrowed.
Emily Levin Commissions 50+ new works from across the nation for GroundWork(s)
Despite the fact that the range of a modern harp rivals that of the piano, Levin points out that as an early 20th century innovation, the harp has a pretty limited repertoire. She points out that there are no traditional works by Beethoven or Brahms for the harp, only one by Mozart (“Concerto for Flute and Harp”), and Debussy and Ravel made strides in composing for the harp.
“It's not that rewarding to play the same songs over and over.”
This limitation led to a creative spark for Levin. She decided to start commissioning new composers to write specifically for the harp, but Levin, who loves solving puzzles in her spare time, was still missing something.
“Whenever I'd go back to Colorado to play concerts, all of these people who knew my parents or people who knew me from childhood would attend, and they were always so excited and so supportive. And I thought how nice it was that my hometown community was still so interested,” she says. “And then it got me thinking about how transient musicians are and how it's rare that we end up in the same place where we grew up.”
She initiated GroundWork(s) with the mission of inviting composers from each U.S. state, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, to compose a new harp-centric work to be premiered in their hometown, celebrating the composers and the communities that first supported them.
“So the very first composer I connected with was Reena Esmail. She's in California, and she's fantastic, and I just called her up,” Levin states. “She considers how our art can play into larger society and she's very community focused. Her immediate response really gave me confidence.”
The first GroundWork(s) world-premiere commences in March 2022, with a solo harp piece in three movements called Mythos composed by Michael Ippolito to be performed in his hometown of Tampa and the University of South Florida. Ippolito has curated the evening’s program, a split harp and piano recital with USF Associate Professor of Piano Eunmi Ko playing piano in addition to Levin on harp.
“The rough theme is variations,” Levin states about the recital. “All of the pieces that we're playing are variations in themselves or variations on traditional repertoire approaches. But it was all done to sort of give the audience a glimpse into who Michael is as a composer and the work that he does.”
Although Levin started reaching out to composers several years ago, the pandemic paused the possibility of rehearsals and recitals, but the project is gaining speed now. Levin has world-premieres for the harp commissioned in California, Illinois, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Florida, Puerto Rico, Massachusetts, and Oregon, and shares a few details of what to expect.
“Next season, Dr. Aaron Holloway-Nahum, originally from Chicago, is writing a two harp concertino and the Contemporary Music Ensemble at Northwestern University will be premiering it in February 2023. Ben Bolter, who has helped organize this collaboration, will conduct. Angélica Negròn is writing a trio for violin, cello, and harp and we're premiering it in Puerto Rico.”
“There are some really incredible composers that I have lined up,” Levin shares. “And it's still in its infancy. I'm just excited because the composers that I've asked are so curious and creative. It’s just like a joyful thing to be working on.”
The Harp and the History
Growing up in Denver, Colorado, Levin’s mother wanted her daughter to learn the cello, but she was waitlisted. As her father, a minister, read to her the Biblical story of young David playing the harp for King Saul, she was taken by how the harp healed Saul’s troubled spirits. The next morning, the four-year-old Levin approached her mother and stated she was going to switch instruments.
Luckily for the Levins, Mary Kay Waddington, who developed the Suzuki method for the harp, lived less than 15 miles away from their home. Levin studied with Waddington from ages 5-18, and would go on to pursue her undergraduate degree at Indiana University where she studied the harp under Susann McDonald. There she also completed a second major in history, and it’s apparent that the history of the harp appeals to Levin almost as much as the performance.
“With the harp, there is a complex backstory of how it developed to its current iteration,” Levin shares. “For example, there's a lot of history connecting the harp to the role of women in society and the prevalence of music salons in the early 1800s.”
She continued her graduate studies in the harp under Nancy Allen at Juilliard, and was a month into her doctoral program when the Dallas Symphony invited her to join them.
“At some point, I would like to go back to school and get my doctorate,” Levin states. “You just need a lot of time to do that. And that is one thing I don't have right now.”
Emily Levin Finds Her All in Dallas
The last five years have been quite the blur for Levin. She auditioned for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in September 2015 to begin the following year. She had won the new principal harpist position with the Santa Fe Opera in August 2015 and had also just begun her doctoral studies at Juilliard the month before. Faced with this difficult decision to continue her studies or become a principal harpist for a major symphony, she finished her first year of coursework, packed her bags and headed to Texas in the autumn of 2016.
“The orchestra is just fantastic,” Levin shares. “It's a really warm, supportive group of people and they play so well. And over time, I was asked to become the Artistic Director of Fine Arts Chamber Players, which is the small chamber series here.”
The chamber series performs free monthly concerts.“We highlight the musicians of Dallas-Fort Worth. One of the gems about this place, I think, is how many incredible musicians live here. And this series lets our local talent shine.”
During the nadir of the pandemic, Levin moved her performances online. “You can see this very slow learning curve, because I am not a videographer or editor but I learned how to do it over time. Even in the early videos, I'm also proud of them, because I was just trying to make concerts that would bring people joy, essentially.”
In addition to highlighting local artists, Emily Levin strives to introduce audiences to new composers, too.
“Our audience is pretty game for anything, if we’re presenting it in an approachable way. I try to make sure that there's good representation and composers that sound just as good as Beethoven, and deserve to be played as well. It’s like a dinner party, where if you invite the same people every single time you run out of things to talk about. Whereas if you bring in new voices, you'll have new things to hear and new things to appreciate.”
In Dallas, Levin lives with her husband, composer Jonathan Cziner, and their two dogs, Charlie and JoJo. Charlie, a pointer-border collie-lab mix, was a stray they discovered while dining al fresco at a Dallas cafe, and because he is anxious when left alone, JoJo, a mutt who “loves everyone ferociously” is his constant companion. Together, the foursome take long walks, trying to find all the hidden nature spots throughout Dallas. She also joined the faculty of Southern Methodist University teaching harp.
“I've just felt really loved and supported, which has been great. I feel like a part of the community here.”
Something Borrowed
“Creating a narrative helps you connect things, bridging that gap between esoteria and emotions to make it a complete package.”
In her programming, Levin thinks about larger narrative arcs, fitting the puzzle pieces together, and featuring music inspired by other artistic genres, literary and visual.
For her debut CD Something Borrowed (Iris Records, 2017), she commissioned four short pieces based on the poetry of childhood favorite Shel Silverstein, including one by her husband composer Jonathan Cziner. She adapted several piano transcriptions for the harp, in addition to Marcel Tournier’s Sonatine (influenced by Ravel’s Sonatine), and André Caplet’s musical portraits of French and Spanish culture. The album, which earned Levine a 2017 Young Artist of the Year accolade from the Classical Recording Foundation, celebrates wonderment, joy, and playfulness.
“Playfulness is a very important quality in life,” Levin opines. “When you see little children playing, you see that there's so much creativity. I think if you're too serious, you cannot have any fun.”
Partners in Life & Music
Levin and Cziner met through a mutual friend who was arranging a concert for new harp compositions at Juilliard. Randomly paired as composer and harpist, they met over coffee to discuss their collaboration, the first of many, including as one of the featured composers on her first CD.
The couple married in 2021 at a small ceremony on Pier 26 in New York City followed by an intimate cocktail party at the Clover Club in Brooklyn, after four years of long distance while Cziner completed his doctorate at Juilliard.
Levin notes that composing for the harp is challenging, and Cziner approaches these compositions with “intentional creativity, to strike that balance between not feeling limited by the instrument, but also not making it crazy, chromatic, and impossible. He will write things that he's inspired by and then he'll come back to them to refine his ideas.”
One of their most ambitious collaborations to-date is a digital offering as part of the Astral Micro Commission series. The interactive concert creates a “choose your own adventure” fairy tale as you can create the storyline and choose the accompanying music, including new works by Cziner. Emily Levin will debut the Astral Micro Commision live in February 2022 as part of Astral’s 30th Season at the American Philosophical Society’s Ben Franklin Hall.
At the Gugenheim, they attended an exhibit of the works of the spiritualist painter Hilma AF Klint. Klint’s works inspired the Astral Micro Commission.
“Klint said she was commissioned to make all of these paintings that were to be displayed hundreds of years after her death in this temple that had an ascending spiral staircase, which is the Guggenheim, only it hadn't been created yet,” Levin states. “Her works begin as pretty concrete, like two images of a swan, but then she'll take one motif at a time and she'll transform it, so by the end of the series, it's totally abstract.”
The Astral Micro Commission also plays with ever more abstract motifs, riffing on variations, and ascending to something higher and more ethereal.
“It is also a commentary on the nature of home,” Levin explains. Angélica Negrón’s “Technicolor” is a work that Levin describes as being “about the nostalgia of childhood.” Henriette Renié turns to the house of horrors in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” while Levin describes Cziner’s “Music for the Temple” as a “beautiful blending of a sacred space that is also your resident space.”
“We’re exploring the emotional sides, the sacred and profane,” she shares. “Because you know, that's where we've all been for so long.”
