Our Better Selves
2026
Song Cycle
Program Notes
Our Better Selves” is a song cycle for soprano and piano, composed for soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Rachel on stage twice as a lead at the Metropolitan Opera. As soon as I experienced her amazing vocal and emotive talent, I’ve wanted to compose something for her to sing.
In looking for texts, Rachel expressed a interest in for writings which may inspire, even celebrate a return to civility and grace. In this search, it became clear that texts which point to these values might also acknowledge their opposites - which which seem ever present in a culture obsessed with cruelty and outrage.
The song cycle begins and ends with two poems by Pulitzer prize winning poet Kay Ryan, “Relief” and “Tenderness and Rot”. The second poem “Power” is by Carol Lynn Pearson and ode to empowerment and freedom. The third song is a setting text written by Rachel herself. “How Can it Be?” is a beautiful meditation on the theme, while pointedly asking these unanswerable questions.
The final poem “Tenderness and Rot” is quite spare. I set it with a more open reflective feeling. It feels like an elegy for the loss of kindness, an expression of this razor the thin line that separates all we do and choose, between the poles of love and hate.
-Jeff Beal
OperaWire Interview
Q & A: Composer Jeff Beal on Composing a New Song Cycle for Rachel Willis-Sørensen
By Francisco Salazar
Poems
When she learned that she
Didn’t have to plug into
Someone or something
Like a toaster into a wall
When she learned that she
Was a windmill and had only
To raise her arms
To catch the universal whisper
And turn
turn
turn
She moved.
Oh, she moved
And her dance was a marvel.
— Carol Lynn Pearson1.Relief
We know it is close
to something lofty.
Simply getting over being sick
or finding lost property
has in it the leap,
the purge, the quick humility
of witnessing a birth—
how love seeps up
and retakes the earth.
There is a dreamy
wading feeling to your walk
inside the current
of restored riches,
clocks set back,
disasters averted.
— Kay Ryan
2. Power
4. Tenderness & Rot
Tenderness and rot
share a border.
And rot is an
aggressive neighbor
Whose iridescence
keeps creeping over.
No lessons
can be drawn
from this however.
One is not
two countries.
One is not meat
corrupting.
It is important
to stay sweet
and loving.
— Kay RyanOriginal poem by Rachel Willis-Sørensen
3. How can it be?
How can it be possible in a world full of bumblebees
and sunsets beautiful enough
to steal the breath from your lungs
that there is also war?
How can there be raspberries and bathing naked in the sea
and also murder?
How can a world populated solely by mothers and their children
also hold such violence and corruption?
If everyone is born to woman
how can it be so dangerous
for a woman to walk alone at night?
What about the smell of the dirt after it rains?
What about when someone gently caresses your skin
and little eager bumps arise to drink in he pleasure?
What about the bright mist which gently sprays when oranges are peeled?
What about fingertips and tongues?
What about the sound of wind in the leaves?
What about the shocking glory of the canopy above our heads?
Never the same twice!
What about singing?
What about belly laughs?
What about deep breaths?
What about music?
How can there be war? How can there be hatred?
How is there even time for evil
when there is so much beauty?
— Rachel Willis-Sørensen