Shulamit Ran: The Creative Spark
People often ask me, what are the sources of inspiration? And I say all of life is inspiration. Like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder. They can be small things or large things, but they are special to me, and they become the triggers for the creative spark.
In these words, composer Shulamit Ran, a brilliant luminary of the Chicago music scene, has described the workings of her musical imagination.
It was such a pleasure to explore the joys and challenges of music-making with Shulamit and to delve into her piece Moon Songs, the centerpiece of Guarneri Hall’s From Earth To Sky programs on October 26 and 27, 2026.
LINDA BERNA: We’re very excited for the return of your musical voice to Guarneri Hall. Moon Songs is really the heart of this program, the lynchpin that ties the whole evening together.
The musicians who perform here often speak warmly of how inspiring it is to work directly with the composers whose pieces they are playing. As a composer, is it the same for you, when you prepare a piece with performers who are really committed to the integrity of its expression?
SHULAMIT RAN: Absolutely! It’s true whether I’m working with performers that I have collaborated with in the past, or new collaborations. This truly is one of the joys of a composer. And this kind of collaboration is very intimate. Because the people who perform my music really dig into it and get to know it better than anyone. Their enthusiasm and commitment is a huge encouragement and validation for a composer.
In the case of Moon Songs, Kristina Bachrach, a truly amazing singer, has performed the piece at the Marlboro Festival and toured with it. Kristina was a student of Lucy Shelton, who first performed Moon Songs and recorded it, and whose entire persona was, in a way, the inspiration for the vocal writing of this piece. So there is already this close, almost familial relationship. I’ve also worked with Alex Hersh in two festivals on different pieces, and he is a wonderful player and musician. I’ve enjoyed very fine previous collaborations with Winston Choi, and I’m looking forward to working with Sasha Ishov. So, this is all exciting. It feels just right.
LINDA: There is a real joy in being able to deepen and expand what you want to express in your music, so having the opportunity to revisit and reimagine a special piece is tremendously gratifying.
SHULAMIT: And for me, it’s also a joy to witness firsthand the various ways in which performers make the piece come alive, differences in interpretations, in personalities that come through the performance.
LINDA: You’ve had many commissions from specific performers and ensembles. How do you factor in their musical personality, their artistry or virtuosity, when they ask you for music?
SHULAMIT: Well, I try both to get to know the performer or ensemble for whom I’m writing, and to think in terms of ways to really make them shine. I want my music, of course, to come through in the best possible way, but that way is also reflected in writing music for these specific performers to really show themselves most musically, brilliantly, and dramatically. At the same time, I want to write in a way that also encourages other performers to approach it and make it their own. So there is always that dual level of writing specifically for performers but also thinking of the instrument or the type of voice that I’m writing for. I very often think in terms of the soul of the instrument, which is never just as simple as its range, the span of its lowest to highest sounds. That’s only the beginning. You can have two instruments with basically the same range, and yet completely different personalities.
LINDA: Moon Songs was commissioned in 2011 by the Dolce Suono Ensemble as an homage and a companion piece to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Can you speak to what that meant to you as a composer, to be asked to respond musically to that landmark piece which has been called the beginning of our new music?
SHULAMIT: And in so many ways, it truly is. It was, of course, a major challenge to be thinking in those terms. But I also thought, Pierrot Lunaire is already a part of who I am as a composer. I definitely had no desire or interest to make my piece in some way a mirror image of Pierrot, written in the same style. So I gravitated to something that, on one level, is very basic, but at the same time felt right: let me find poetry that involves the moon. It all revolves around the moon. There’s a reason why that is so appealing. Yesterday, my husband and I were walking outside, and the moon was shining, and it was almost a full moon, and I just had to say, Look at this! Look at the moon! It is something that has always fascinated humankind.
LINDA: From the very beginning.
SHULAMIT: Right! I looked through a lot of poems that spoke of the moon, perhaps only briefly, but often in very telling ways. Eventually I decided to zero in on texts that were either in English or in Hebrew, the two dominant languages in my own life, and there was a lot of beautiful material there. It was a fascinating and extremely important part of the pre-compositional process to gather the materials and interweave them so that they actually created new entities. The final text takes excerpts and fragments and weaves them together in various ways, some more complex and some more direct.
The poetry covers a huge span of time, from the Psalms to medieval Hebrew poetry, to English poetry from Renaissance to modern, even up to the present day. I included poetry by three wonderful writers who were alive at the time: two Israelis, Almog Behar and Haim Gouri, and an American, Samuel Menashe, who sadly passed away shortly after I completed the piece. Each one gave their full blessing when I asked permission to use their poetry. I think many creative artists, whether composers or poets or from any field, are very enthusiastic about the idea of artists from another discipline doing things with their art that are not necessarily the things that you would expect.
LINDA: It’s part of the afterlife of the artwork.
SHULAMIT: Correct. I also knew almost from the beginning that I wanted the piece to have the feel of a drama. I ultimately came up with something that I call a song cycle in four acts. There are also two entr’actes, shorter but important sections which function as bridges between acts, using single instruments, first the solo cello, and second the piccolo with spoken voice. Actually, that second one with piccolo and voice is the only segment of this song cycle that alludes directly to Pierrot Lunaire, taking its ninth of its poems in an a very good English translation that was made especially for this purpose by David Stillman, the father of flutist Mimi Stillman, who commissioned the piece.
Pierrot Lunaire led to so much of what came next in music. The way in which the voice is used, the sprechstimme — half sung, half spoken. That really was an Incredible invention that opened the door to a new world of sound. And immediately, I knew that I wanted to do something that would be, not just a song cycle, but acted, almost like a play, through music. And Lucy Shelton, for whose voice I wrote the work, is acclaimed for being a singer who is incredible at expressing herself with movements, attire, in all dramatic parameters. As is her student, Kristina Bachrach!
LINDA: Literature seems to be a powerful creative catalyst for you in general, even in your non-vocal works. Is that something you feel?
SHULAMIT: Well, the larger body of my non-vocal, non-texted work is what would be normally considered abstract, not programmatic. Though I often wonder about these two categories.
LINDA: It’s not a distinction I particularly believe in myself.
SHULAMIT: Exactly, I feel the same way. Because even music that is supposed to be the most absolute, “pure” music, Beethoven quartets, for example, these works are so human, so telling. How can you just divide music in such a way? And on the reverse side of it, I would say that with every work of mine that does use text or is in some way programmatic, it is of primary importance for me that the music also speaks on its own terms as pure music. If you came to it without knowing anything about the text, not understanding the language, not having read the poetry ahead of time, it would still speak to you as music.
LINDA: The sound world that you created in Moon Songs is sometimes mysterious like Schoenberg’s and sad and somber, of course, but it’s also rhapsodic to me. It seems to transport you to this beautiful, mystical, fantastical place, and I’m wondering what kind of atmosphere you might have been thinking about when you were creating your moon world.
SHULAMIT: I’m so glad that you mentioned these adjectives, mysterious and fantastical. That was very much part of what I was trying to create. This is a work that really has a wide variety of moods, for one thing, and even, I would say, styles of musical language: from music that is dreamy or volatile or fantastical, and folk music inspired. It’s not folk music that belongs to a particular place or people, but nonetheless, it’s that style. The poetry for these sections was rhythmical and rhymed, so it seemed to invite writing in this folksy style. It was especially joyful for me to invent this music, not to use existing folk materials, but to invent them, and yet make you feel as though they were always there.
LINDA: The spirit and the sound of that music you evoked perfectly.
SHULAMIT: There is a very wide range of different moods in this work, and many characters. In the first act opening, I used the Hebrew words of Haim Gouri. The Hebrew language has very often a guttural quality, because of the “ch” sound as in L’chaim, or chutzpah. But in this case, the lines that open the poem have a very mellifluous sound that emphasizes the repeated “l.” And I was drawn to that sound. So that segment is flowing and lyrical. But after the Hebrew line that says “creating a moon for you,” I inserted the section in Psalm 104 that speaks of the creation of the moon. For the biblical lines, I used something that I would describe as almost statuesque. Incantational.
LINDA: Yes, like chant, very ritualistic.
SHULAMIT: Exactly, ritualistic, a wonderful word. And that’s when the cello enters for the first time, at that point of the creation of the moon. For me, the poetry will always dictate certain musical, characteristic and stylistic elements.
LINDA: That struck me as well, the alternation of style and mood within each act, but also from act to act: from incantation to meditation, mourning, and even ecstasy. I wonder if you feel it relates to the moon, which is often a symbol of change and transformation.
SHULAMIT: Yes, I absolutely do. The sun makes life possible; it can destroy life, but without it, there is no life. But the moon is that magical, mysterious entity of continuing fascination, and probably always will be. So it is not surprising at all that Schoenberg chose to write Pierrot Lunaire and not surprising that it has spoken to so many. And not surprising that the moon has been such an important symbol in poetry, and in music written for that poetry. It is forever inspiring.
LINDA: Again, thank you so much for your time and your thoughts. Moon Songs are gorgeous pieces, and such great examples of your own unique and expansive musical voice.
SHULAMIT: Thank you very much. I’m grateful to Guarneri Hall for presenting the piece in what, in fact, will be its first Chicago performance. And I’m delighted that it’s happening in this beautiful and acoustically wonderful space.
Shulamit Ran’s works have been performed by leading ensembles in the U.S., Europe, and Israel. Among her numerous awards, fellowships and commissions are those from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fromm Music Foundation, WFMT, Chamber Music America, the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the Philadelphia Orchestra (Symphony, first performed in 1990). For the Symphony she was awarded not only the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 but also the first-place Kennedy Center Friedheim Award for orchestral music in 1992.
Shulamit joined the faculty of the University of Chicago’s Department of Music in 1973. She now holds the title of Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor Emerita, having retired in 2015 after more than four decades of teaching.
Her Moon Songs will be performed at Guarneri Hall on October 26 and 27, 2026.
Linda Berna
Linda Berna is President of the Board of Directors of Guarneri Hall NFP. She served as the Associate Dean and Director of the Music Conservatory at Chicago College of Performing Arts, Roosevelt University, from 2001-2022. Dr. Berna earned her bachelor's and master’s degrees in Piano Performance from Roosevelt University and her PhD in Music Theory from Northwestern University. In addition to her work at Guarneri Hall, Dr. Berna serves as an accreditation evaluation team chair for the National Association of Schools of Music.
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