Sylvia Songs

When composer Jenny Olivia Johnson moved to Boston in 2009 to teach at Wellesley College, she had no idea that one of her most idolized poets and authors, Sylvia Plath, had grown up in the small town of Wellesley. Learning this fact, while settling into her new position among the crisp blue skies and ornate, sometimes skeletal tree branches that adorn Wellesley's landscape, planted the slow-growing seed for this eventual collection of songs: songs about the short life of Sylvia Plath, and songs about Jenny's adjacent life experiences in some of the same places in which Plath once lived and worked: New York, Boston, and Wellesley. It was Sylvia Plath's now famous summer in New York City- the summer that inspired her novel "The Bell Jar"- that would initially lure Jenny into Plath's archive. Jenny's own impactful years in New York City, where she attended college and graduate school, coincided with some of her most profound self-discoveries, several of which felt strangely in concert with the ways in which Plath described Esther Greenwood's "queer, sultry" New York summer in 1953, and her exhausted return to Boston in the moody steam of August. Jenny's move to Boston from New York in 2009 provided further inspiration and in 2012 Jenny became inspired to set these feelings of emotional closeness to Plath to music. Sylvia Songs is both an offering and an archive, a memorial and a reverie. It is a meditation on the nostalgia of place, and an exploration of the complexities of mental health and loss.