Esmail: RE|Member

Reena Esmail (1983 - )

Whatever else might be said about the state of our nation in 2024, it is a little-known but definite fact that the art of American music composition (as opposed, granted, to the business of music composition) is thriving. 21st Century composition teaching has shed the modernist orthodoxy that swallowed it in previous decades, and music communities from Spartanburg to New York and everywhere in between host young or mid-career composers who write with verve, appeal, and in an enormous diversity of musical voices. 

Reena Esmail is one of the brightest young stars in this new galaxy of musical pluralism. Composer-in-residence at Tanglewood and Spoleto, respectively, in the last two summers, she has recently become hugely popular with American orchestras, choirs, and chamber groups. Her academic credentials are impeccable (one degree from Juilliard, three from Yale), but what makes her music distinctive is its fluent and expressive incorporation of North Indian influences into the Western idiom she knows so well. Having grown up in an Indian-American household in Los Angeles, she comes by her influences honestly, but also spent two years in India on a Fulbright, mastering Hindustani music theory. 

- Chris Vaneman

For Reena Esmail, RE|Member was a chance to explore what the world has gone through: 

“When I first spoke to Maestro Dausgaard (Seattle Symphony) about this piece, we thought it would be opening their 2020 season. We spoke about that feeling of returning to the concert hall after the summer – a change of season, a yedarly ritual. But as the pandemic unraveled life as we knew it, the ‘return’ suddenly took on much more weight.

Now the piece charts the return to a world forever changed… writing the musicians back onto a stage that they left in completely uncertain circumstances, and that they are re-entering from such a wide variety of personal experiences of this time.

I wanted this piece to feel like an overture, and my guides were two favorites: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Bernstein’s Candide. Each is breathless and energetic, with pockets of intimacy and tenderness. Each contains many parallel universes that unfold quickly. Each has beautiful, memorable melodies that speak and beckon to one another. I strove for all of this in RE|Member.”

It is a multifaceted title, and by happy coincidence also allowed Esmail to ‘sign’ the work with her initials, RE: 

“I only noticed that after the fact! This piece connects two meanings of the word ‘remember’. Firstly, the sense that something is being brought back together. The orchestra is re-membering, coalescing again after being apart. The pandemic will have been transformative: the orchestra is made up of individuals who had a wide variety of experiences in this time. And they are bringing those individual experiences back into the collective group. There might be people who committed more deeply to their musical practice, people who were drawn into new artistic facets, people who had to leave their creative practice entirely, people who came to new realizations about their art, career, life. All these new perspectives, all these strands of thought and exploration are being brought back together.

And the second meaning of the word: that we don’t want to forget the perspectives which each of these individuals gained during this time, simply because we are back in a familiar situation. I wanted this piece to honor the experience of coming back together, infused with the wisdom of the time apart.”

- Raff Wilson