While I was a student at the Curtis Institute of Music, I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses several times during my work-study shifts as a stagehand. I remember reading the story of Echo and Narcissus in the hallway behind the Field Concert Hall stage as the music reverberated around me. I still associate those stories with the sound of that hallway.

I returned to Echo’s story in Echo’s Lament, a piece for solo horn commissioned for Curtis’s centennial. Cursed to repeat only the last words spoken by others, Echo falls in love with Narcissus but cannot tell him so in words of her own. When she tries to embrace him, he rejects her harshly. Crushed, she retreats into solitude and wastes away until only her unanswered voice remains, echoing through the forest.

The piece moves through three sections: a soliloquy, a dance, and a lament. The outer sections draw on the horn’s harmonic series and a four-note motif derived from the name “Curtis.” The motif also appears in the lilting central dance, where shifts in register and rapid alternation between open and stopped horn make a single melodic line sound like two voices answering one another.

Music lets us stay with feelings we might otherwise try to avoid. I wanted to give Echo’s sadness the attention Narcissus denies her and explore the beauty in it. For me, marking a century of music education also means listening to voices that have struggled to be heard.

—SC