songs for soprano and string quartet
John Grimmett, librettist
35’00”
composed 2016
composed for and premiered by soprano Ann Moss (San Francisco, California)
string orchestra version arranged for and premiered by Density 215 at Fast Forward Austin (Austin, Texas)
Librettist’s Note
One thing is for sure: as is the case with most children, Ada Lovelace never asked to be born. Imagine, if you will, a child with a propensity for mathematics and an analytical mind, showing evident intellectual giftedness from an early age: her mother insisted she be tutored in these subjects, which certainly was outside the social norms for an aristocratic family — and a young girl in such a family — in the mid-1800s.
Try, too, to imagine why young Ada was put through such a rigorous course of study. She was, after all, the only legitimate child of the famous poet Lord George Gordon Byron, whose marriage to Ada’s mother was not a particularly happy one. Only weeks after Ada was born, Byron and his wife separated, and Byron left for England a few months later. By the age of eight, Ada was a fatherless child — her father was dead. He only wrote about Ada once, calling her “the sole daughter of [her] house and of [his] heart.” I could see Ada, perhaps, sifting through her father’s poetry as a young woman, searching for a man she never knew.
Around the time of her husband’s death, Lady Byron subjected Ada to challenging coursework in mathematics in an attempt to suppress whatever wild flights of fancy the young girl might have inherited from her father. Lady Byron believed Ada needed self-control, going to great lengths to control her daughter’s every move. Though only implied by historians, I prefer to think the relationship was fraught with complications. Lady Byron was an authoritarian, and Ada was required to follow her rules or else be subject to a “taming” of sorts of whatever bits of her father survived. Lady Byron made it quite clear in her lifetime that she had been hurt; Lord Byron’s name, his poetry, and — to a more subtle, insidious extent — his only collaboration with her (poor Ada) was to be resented.
As a writer, these formative beginnings interested me most about a song cycle on Ada Lovelace. And as someone whose high school education in mathematics ended with intermediate algebra, I can say quite certainly that Ada’s gift for numbers was something I still don’t completely understand. But that isn’t what Finite Differences is about, anyway. When Kenneth approached me to write this piece with him, he was excited by Ada’s scientific contributions — how, later in her life, she would essentially create the beginnings of computer programming long before a man would figure out how to harness electricity into a single light bulb. She worked closely with Charles Babbage on improvements to his analytical machine and was rejected outright for her ideas simply because she was a woman. Kenneth saw a story in Ada that needed to be told, and soon, I began to see it for myself: a constant struggle for a young woman who could understand numbers beyond most of our abilities yet had so many words and feelings inside of her. She felt deeply after being abandoned by her father, manipulated by her mother, loved (and then betrayed) by men like Babbage with whom she worked closely. The dualities of the mind and heart — the logical and the emotional — are the essence of this piece, the possibilities infinite, the differences finite. As Kenneth and I were reluctant to write a biographical and historical pageant, we were glad to discover that these logical and emotional differences is what connects Ada to today and all of us.
Kenneth has written some challenging music for soprano and string quartet, and it embodies Ada’s struggle of “woman against machine.” But the machine, she discovers, is more emotional than mathematical, culminating in a series of missed opportunities — being born too soon is one of her greatest challenges she must overcome. She is constantly misunderstood by her mother and the men in her life: when her work on Babbage’s analytical machine was published in a scientific journal, for example, she was published only by her initials (“A.A.L.”) so that the readership would not know she was a woman. And despite the article’s brilliance, it attracted little attention. She was reduced, after she had been diagnosed with uterine cancer, to deriving gambling probabilities (all of them failures) that put her in financial jeopardy.
Ada Lovelace died on November 27, 1852, just shy of her 37th birthday. She was buried next to her father in a final move that, I’m certain, infuriated the mother who survived her. For such a brilliant mind, it pains me to think what Lovelace might have been able to accomplish had she lived in today’s world, when medical technology might have been able to save her or that her studies in science and mathematics would not be ridiculous pursuits. Alas, Ada was destined to “see the world from above, the only place it can be known, not as it wishes to be but as it is in all its frightful imperfections touched.” Kenneth and I hope this piece will be a fitting tribute for a woman who gave this world so much but is remembered so little.
One thing is for sure: as is the case with most children, Ada Lovelace never asked to be born. But, boy — aren’t we all sure glad she was here, even in the moment fleeting, to be, in her father’s words, “with a hope?”
– John Grimmett