Christopher Hill | 9 JAN 2026
Composer Jennifer Higdon was in Raleigh, North Carolina, one morning this past November (2025) to provide feedback in rehearsal for a forthcoming performance of her Suite from Cold Mountain by the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra. After the rehearsal she graciously agreed to sit with EarRelevant contributor Christopher Hill for the following interview.
Christopher Hill: Good to meet you, Ms. Higdon.
Jennifer Higdon: Good to meet you, too.
CH: Let me start by asking an obvious question: What’s it been like working with the North Carolina Symphony this week? And more specifically: What’s it been like working with the conductor, Carlos Miguel Prieto?
JH: It’s been fantastic. I’ve worked with Carlos before from a distance when he’s done my pieces in other places — and I think also here in Raleigh — but I wasn’t able to be where he was at those times because I’m on the road so much. I think this might be the first time I’ve worked with him in person. I love his rehearsal technique, and I love this orchestra. Since moving to North Carolina, I’ve been coming to their concerts.
CH: And you moved here from …?
JH: From Philadelphia, where I lived for years. Anyway, I’d call this collaboration with the North Carolina Symphony under Carlos fantastic. My Suite from Cold Mountain has been played by maybe four dozen orchestras so far, but it hasn’t always been performed with the subtlety and nuance and passion I’m hearing in these rehearsals.
CH: Many of your other works are also being performed by major orchestras both across this country and around the world. Maybe part of your success comes from the variety of your music. You’re not a one-trick pony … or even a three-trick pony when it comes to compositional techniques. On the one hand there’s the animated polyphony we hear in parts of the Cold Mountain Suite, but then there’s the also the more gestural language heard in your Violin Concerto and the more chordal, choirlike strata of your orchestral piece blue cathedral. Yet despite all the variety among your compositions, I feel like I’m always hearing the same composer speaking in these works. Which (maybe) makes the following question meaningful: What sorts of things do you hope audiences will take away from your music? Put another way, when you write a particular piece, are you hoping to communicate something — like overcoming difficulties or acceptance or whatever? Does this make sense?
JH: Actually, that’s not what it’s like when I compose. My approach to each commission is shaped mostly by the person or the forces that I’m writing for. I work with each artist involved and figure out what works for that appropriate situation. So, for example, in my Violin Concerto, Hillary Hahn said she wanted a major piece around 30 or 35 minutes long. The length part was no problem — I don’t write like Webern.
But what did she mean by “major”? I assumed that she wanted something that sounds like no other concerto she plays yet that has the narrative heft of the classic concertos and also the attention to sonority and technique that violin virtuosos appreciate. So I wrote a concerto of that length with those characteristics, one that plays to her strengths as a performing artist and that goes places.
CH: Sounds like figuring out how to shape a new piece based on performers and forces is rather easy for you.
JH: Oh gosh no. I’m starting a piece now, for string quartet and narrator, where the text is by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the narrator will be Sigourney Weaver. It will be performed up at the 92nd Street Y next April. I’ve sort of been agonizing over this …
CH: Sounds a bit like one of those melodrama or Sprechtstimme pieces that had a minor vogue in the early twentieth century — Strauss’s Enoch Arden or Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, and so on. Or maybe like the beatniks reciting poetry to jazz in the 1950s. Now that we’re well into the twenty-first century, is it time to start trying rap for this sort of thing?
JH: You know, I actually thought about that at one point, but then I thought about Sigourney. And of course rap is not something we associate with Ginsburg the opera buff either. I’m still trying to figure out how to do this. So like I said regarding Hillary Hahn, I always try to write to a player’s or ensemble’s strengths. My work will be new to the performer or performers who create it. That’s challenge enough. I don’t need to ask a juggler to become a tap-dancer.
To answer your question another way: My music definitely changes from piece to piece. Sometimes it’s through the harmonic language, sometimes the melodic language, sometimes the way I handle the instruments. It always ends up sounding like me, but the means are flexible. Whatever the changes are, they get a lot of thought.
CH: Since Cold Mountain Suite is being performed this weekend [November 14 & 15, 2025: read the review] and is the music you’re hearing in rehearsal, let’s return to that. I have two basic questions. One is about the Suite itself — but I’ll ask that later. The other question is about writing music with and without texts, and I’ll ask that one now. What’s it like to go from writing music driven by quote-unquote musical logic to music that sets a text — or vice versa? It seems like two somewhat different compositional perspectives are involved. What’s it like for you?
JH: It is really different. Instrumental and vocal music are really different. And I do have to shift gears, and I think a lot about that.
And this is interesting: From between the time I started writing Cold Mountain and afterwards, I noticed something had happened in my brain in the process of writing the opera. It was kind of an incredible thing. Before Cold Mountain I certainly wrote music to texts in some of my works but, before the intense concentration of writing Cold Mountain, as a listener I had some trouble following the lyrics in pop songs I listened to. My brain just couldn’t catch all the words.
So then I wrote the opera. And while I was composing it, I was singing through everything, thinking about the words and characters, thinking about what kind of music to use, about what kind of music would carry the emotion of a scene without having to have that emotion explicitly stated in words — well, something happened to my brain.
And now, when I listen to pop songs, I follow the words easily. It’s like part of my brain was rewired. And it’s not just in songs. In old movies I’ve seen repeatedly, I now also hear dialog more easily. I sometimes think, I didn’t realize they were saying that the last time I watched this. So composing Cold Mountain actually rewired my brain.
So you do have to think differently when you’re writing vocal music, because the demands of the voice and how to get words out clearly are really different from just writing instrumentally. You have to stop and think about what really happens when people sing.
That’s just the vocal part. But an opera is also not a series of songs but a drama. Every work I write is a big deal, but an opera is a big big deal. So before doing the opera I talked at length to the people who commissioned it.
And I was also aware that the author, Charles Frazier, was still alive, and out of respect for him I needed to make sure my music served his characters not just in one set piece or another but over the two-and-a-half hours of different scenes depicting the varying moods and revelations of his story. Taking all those things into consideration, the opera’s music unfolds at a slower pace than much of my music does.
Composer Jennifer Higdon (credit: JD Scott))
CH: When you were writing Cold Mountain did you think mainly about drama or did you also think about effectiveness for the voice?
JH: Finding the sweet spot in dramatic and effective vocal writing was a learning process. I was lucky with Cold Mountain because I got it workshopped at Curtis with just singers and a piano accompaniment. The students who workshopped it taught me a lot about the voice. I asked them a million questions like “Why does this line sound like it’s strained? What can I do ?” And they were amazing. They taught me a lot.
Even so, in Cold Mountain I was really pushing voices to the edge. Because it was my first opera, I sometimes had people singing too high. Not without reason, you know — I was thinking that, dramatically, these situations in the story are emergencies. People are shooting at my characters. They’re in danger. And so I had the characters in those situations singing at the top of their tessituras. I knew I was pushing things a bit, but I also knew this was going to premiere with major singers at a major venue, Santa Fe. And it turned out that the premiere was, sometimes, hard for the singers. But they managed to pull it off.
I thought a lot afterwards about how to bring singers down from the upper reaches of their tessituras when they are exhausted. I learned a lot about that thinking about Cold Mountain after its premiere.
My second opera, Woman with Eyes Closed, premiered at the Pittsburgh Opera in April of this year. And when I heard the first run through of that opera, I thought, I’ve finally figured out how to write an opera. It was literally, Okay, now I’ve got it. You have to get in there and make the mistakes, I think, to find your way.
CH: My second question is: What was it like to take a dramatic work and create from it a through-composed Suite that lives or dies on its instrumental sounds alone?
JH: When it came time to actually back up from the finished opera and use its music to create an orchestral suite, I had to change the order of the music as it appears in the opera. Because in an instrumental work, musical logic is more important than the order of dramatic events in a libretto. There’s also the practical aspect of assigning vocal parts to instruments — should this vocal line be assigned to an oboe or that vocal line to a trombone? I was so close to the sung lines, with all their nuances, that sometimes it was hard to step back and imagine, Alright, what instrument works best here? What color could pull this off? Sometimes it was really hard. I’m relieved, because it worked, but there are a couple of passages that I’ve revised and revised to get the right feel, to approach what I hear in my mind. Listening to the North Carolina Symphony rehearsing those passages in their latest version, it sounds like I may finally be done with revisions.
CH: The devil’s always in the detail. But creating an eighteen-minute orchestral work from a two-and-a-half-hour opera must certainly have been a challenge on another level.
JH: In the Suite I knew I was writing for instruments only, so I tried to find the most interesting way to assemble parts of the opera as an instrumental piece. It wasn’t always easy to do. The winds need something different than the brass are going to need or the strings, and the notation will be a little different from notation for vocalists. Lots of little details. But in terms of the big picture, my background helped.
CH: Tell me how …
JH: The music has some of my East Tennessee childhood in it. I grew up close to Cold Mountain. In fact, the farm I lived on can be located on a map printed in Frazier’s novel. I think this intimacy, this familiarity allowed me to make meaningful choices, to identify and sustain an authentic emotional level in the music.
CH: It’s easy to hear the rural side of your early years in Cold Mountain Suite. And you’ve spoken before in other interviews about what it was like growing up in East Tennessee. So let me go in another direction. What about the Atlanta side of your early years? Does your music reflect any of that?
JH: You mean “Rhythms of the City” or whatever? For me it was more rhythms of the household. My father was a freelance commercial artist, so he worked from home, and he had great stereo equipment, too, which he had on all the time he was working. This meant I was hearing what he listened to a whole lot. Things like 60s Folk — so … Peter, Paul and Mary, stuff like that; and also early Bob Marley, early Rolling Stones, the Bob Dylan Basement Tapes. A lot of kids didn’t grow up in homes with music like that playing, but that’s what I grew up on.
My dad was also really big on making sure that I tried all kinds of music, including bluegrass. And not just music. When I got old enough he also took me to experimental theater puppet shows, experimental films, theatrical pieces that were kind of a mash up of weird tape sounds. Tape sounds were big because 8-track and 16-track tape got used a lot during that time. I remember dad showing us the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album and talking about the value of all the different sounds in there. So that had to have a huge influence on me.
As far as classical music goes, in Atlanta we went to concerts and ballets sometimes, but I didn’t really hear much classical around the house. I do think the richness of the music my dad listened to affects the way I write. I think every composer’s brain is programmed by the sound world that surrounded them when they were growing up. For instance, if you grow up with rock you might feel more of a need for a pulse in your music.
CH: Speaking of pulse, how was it that you got involved with both percussion and flute in high school?
JH: The flute happened just because my mom got a flute at a pawn shop. It was the one instrument in the house at the time. The percussion … well, in my early teens I wasn’t someone who thought of music as her only creative calling. I had been doing a lot of writing — not music writing, but word writing. And my brother and I had also been making experimental films. But as I got into my mid teens, there was something about music that was kind of sucking me in. So I remember at that time asking for a drum set and getting it.
CH: I guess not too many flute players want to be percussionists, or vice versa. How might those two instruments have influenced your compositional voice?
JH: I certainly value the sense of percussion in a work, the awareness of colors arising from what percussionists do. It was the flute, though, that taught me how to listen to music in lines. Counterpoint is very important to me. Many of my students play piano, and they always seem to think chordally. On the contrary, all the people I know who play single-line instruments and have become composers, they tend to think contrapuntally, like Bach. Thanks to the flute, my orientation is melodic and contrapuntal. Does that make sense? At the same time, thanks to percussion, I love clear and colorful rhythm in my music. But I really think all this stuff overlaps.
CH: Near the beginning of blue cathedral there’s a passage where the flute floats over the ensemble like a haunted presence. Would it be fair to say that the flute expresses one side of your personality and percussion expresses a different side?
JH: Oh, that’s too schematic. It’s true that in the passage you mention, the flute one is very personal. But, for example, in the percussion concerto Duo Duel some of the percussion hits at the beginning and the end grow out of the numbers in my birthday and my brother’s birthday, especially at the end. That’s equally personal. Like I said, this stuff overlaps.
The most important thing is, I do these things by feel. I start with the complex feel of something and afterwards move to practical questions like How do I put this on the page? How are they going to execute this?
CH: I once had an office mate with perfect pitch. I used to envy her fluency in writing down jagged, atonal musical lines as easily and accurately as I could write down words. What are your thoughts on perfect pitch and composing?
JH: I don’t have perfect pitch. But I think I have pretty good relative pitch, and it’s getting better all the time. But perfect pitch? No.
CH: Would you like to have perfect pitch?
JH: Actually, I wouldn’t, because I know performers who have trouble on account of having perfect pitch. It’s something I’ve observed when teaching — students with perfect pitch sometimes struggle a little more to play in tune because they are listening inside their head and not to the ensemble.
I sometimes wonder what advantages I have that didn’t seem like advantages at all when I was an undergraduate struggling to get my ear trained. This continued all the way through graduate school. But in a way it also left the field open for my aural imagination. Even today, sometimes when I notate a passage and later play it, I hear it’s not what I intended. No one wants that, of course.
But, you know, sometimes when I first hear what a passage with a notational mistake really sounds like, the result is better than what I intended. So, again, not having perfect pitch gives me a certain freedom. Overall it actually might be working to my advantage.
CH: I know this sounds obsequious, but I’d venture to say that your strongly developed sense of relative pitch is an important part of what gives your works their exceptional coherence. That plus your ear for timbres and a certain narrative strength — which I wonder may be rooted in your early creative efforts with film and writing with words.
But enough about me! Let’s end with an objective question: What new projects are you currently working on?
JH: Oh, I just finished a cello concerto. It’s premiering in just a few months with the Rochester Philharmonic. Julian Schwartz is the cellist. We are recording the premiere, so I have to get everything right during rehearsals, which is a little unnerving.
I’m also finishing a piece for Stéphane Denève and the Miami City Ballet. And then there’s the Ruth Bader Ginsburg work we talked about.
CH: Ms. Higdon, thanks for taking the time to chat with EarRelevant.
JH: Oh, are you working with Mark Gresham? Mark and I go way back. I really admire what he’s trying to do online these days. I visit his site fairly often.
CH: Keep an eye out for this interview, then.
JH: I will. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Jennifer Higdon: jenniferhigdon.com
Read more by Christopher Hill.
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