AJ has been selected as a
​2020-2021
Cedar Commission Artist
​
"Angels Sang to Me"

Featuring:
Maria Jette, soprano
Leslie Shank, violin
Brenda Mickens, violin
Sifei Cheng, viola
Laura Sewell, cello

To purchase a score, parts, or selections from "Angels Sang to Me" for voice and piano,
​click here.

Angels Sang to Me

"Angels Sang to Me" is a fascinating musical representation of many artists' emotional angels and demons. Composer AJ Isaacson-Zvidzwa draws on quotes from poets and composers with her evocative score.
-Brenda Mickens, violin

The music is beautiful, and frightening, and poignant— scored for voice and string quartet. A fascinating selection of texts, sung (Emily Dickinson poems) and spoken. The quotes by and about well-known composers and poets with mental illness are startling and heart-rending: Clara Schumann describing Robert’s hallucinations, Berlioz describing his own despair, Robert Lowell’s wild and dangerous actions frightening his wife but dismissed as eccentricities of genius by his friends and admirers; and running through it, the composer relates her own terrifying experiences with mental illness.
-Maria Jette, soprano

This work captures both the initial beauty and allure of an onset of an episode before descending into the tragic and dissonant chaos which follows. Haunting and pervasive tones tug empathetic listeners through the experience toward a deeper understanding of the tumultuous experience of living through and despite this illness. 
-Rebecca Evans,
​certified ​peer support specialist

​In the song cycle, Angels Sang to Me, composer AJ Isaacson-Zvidzwa reveals her experiences with mental illness through music, featuring soprano, Maria Jette, and string quartet. AJ’s story is told through poems and writings of past artists who continued to create while mentally ill, including William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe and Hector Berlioz. Instrumental interludes will be interspersed throughout to illustrate the emotional highs and lows of AJ’s journey through bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, touching on fear, confusion, mania, hallucinations, levity, and concluding with a balancing and accepting awareness of one’s illness. The instrumentalists whisper and speak while accompanying the singer, as lyrics and texts draw them through illness towards health. In the process of this work, Angels Sang to Me spreads awareness about mental illness, shows that success with mental illness is possible, and destigmatizes what it means to live with bipolar and schizophrenia.

To read more and listen to the whole piece, click here.

aj.isaacson.zvidzwa@gmail.com
https://www.facebook.com/ajisaacsonzvidzwa​