In a season already packed with highlights—including a performance of Mahler’s monumental Third Symphony at Carnegie Hall as well as collaborations with Juilliard’s Dance Division and Vocal Arts and Historical Performance programs featuring music by Bach, Beethoven, Britten, Poulenc, and Ravel—the Juilliard Orchestra will perform its final 2024–25 concert on May 22 at Alice Tully Hall. Led by Juilliard alum Earl Lee, the program juxtaposes classics of French romantic music by Ravel and Saint-Saëns with a world premiere by Juilliard composition alum Molly Joyce.
Joyce—who earned her bachelor’s at Juilliard and her master’s at Yale and who is a doctoral student at the University of Virginia—was commissioned by Juilliard to write her new work last year, which was a momentous one: She got married and had her first child. The resulting piece, titled Two Lives One Body, was obviously influenced by the changes in her life at the time. “When I started it last summer, I was six months pregnant with my son,” she says, “but I was not trying to make the piece a narrative of my pregnancy journey. Instead, it was more like literally being two lives in one body.”
Two Lives One Body follows the blueprint for many of Joyce’s works. “A lot of my music is kind of minimalist, for lack of a better term,” she explains, “and a lot of the times I like to explore one core idea in the piece. (For Two Lives), I wanted to explore two competing harmonies, which are expanded upon throughout the orchestra.”
Two Lives One Body is the latest of Joyce’s compositions to be commissioned by her undergraduate alma mater. In 2023, two of her songs—“Musibility” and “I Live in the Woods of My Words”—were premiered by soprano Mikaela Bennett (another Juilliard alum) as part of the 23rd Alice Tully Vocal Recital. And two years earlier, Joyce’s Hit or Miss had its first performance during the annual Juilliard Percussion Seminar.
Rounding out on the May 22 program are enduring works by Ravel and Saint-Saëns, both of which are prime musical workouts for the bachelor’s and master’s students who make up the Juilliard Orchestra. Ravel’s rhythmically exciting La Valse, a perfect concert opener, will be followed by Joyce’s Two Lives One Body. Finally, Saint-Saëns’ colossal “Organ” Symphony will make formidable use of Alice Tully Hall’s gigantic 4,200-pipe organ.
Although several of the students performing in the ensemble’s May 22 concert will receive their degrees just a few days later, a new configuration of the Juilliard Orchestra will be part of the school’s second annual Fall Festival on September 18, when French-British conductor Stephanie Childress will make her New York debut leading the musicians at Tully in Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 and the New York premiere of Anna Clyne’s PALLETTE, a Juilliard co-commission with funding by Jody and John Arnhold and the Arnhold Foundation.
Clyne wrote PALETTE—which she says “explores the symbiosis between music and art”—for the Augmented Orchestra she developed with sound designer Jody Elff; it expands the orchestra’s sound world through computer-controlled processes. Clyne further explains on her website that PALETTE “is set in seven five-minute movements—each one exploring a different hue and whose first letters collectively spell the title of the work: Plum, Amber, Lava, Ebony, Teal, Tangerine, and Emerald. As part of the creative process, I have created a painting for each movement—exploring gesture, texture, light and dark, color and form—elements that also translate to music."
