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About the Composer

Shruthi Rajasekar

Composer and performer Shruthi Rajasekar is a McKnight Composer Fellow with the American Composers Forum, Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, Associate of the Royal Northern College of Music (ARNCM), winner of the Global Women in Music Award from the United Nations, and recipient of the Marshall Scholarship from the Government of the United Kingdom. Shruthi’s music...

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Shruthi Rajasekar Music

I Am My Own

Name: I Am My Own
SKU: SRM022
Availability: InStock

Shruthi Rajasekar

Passionate text from the Brontë sisters is used to explore the challenging balance underlying choirs and democracies at large: the importance of the individual versus the unity of the collective.

Difficulty: 4

Duration: 5-10 min.

SRM022

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SATB Choir + single handbell

Choirs and democratic governments have something in common: they move between celebrating the individual and celebrating the collective. To explore this balance and tension, Shruthi Rajasekar weaves together Victorian-era text from the novels of all three Brontë sisters. The title, I Am My Own, comes from Jane Eyre’s declaration that she is “her own mistress.” Amidst passionate and yearning music lies the heart of the piece: a wildly experimental page that will reshape the way your choir sings and and the way your choir listens.

Composer’s Notes

Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë wrote radical novels within their 19th-century Victorian-era circumstances. These texts depict individuals existing in tension with community, much as we are on the precipice of something (maybe many things) irreparably breaking in our world today. Though these novels are hailed as feminist texts, we should also scrutinize the Brontë canon, especially the classist, racist, ableist, and patriarchal norms espoused by their society and parroted faithfully by the sisters. Nonetheless, I reread these authors because I am taken with the image of “the departure” – when a pivotal character in each of the three novels quoted here (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) leaves. When they declare, “I am my own.” When they walk away – to their new destiny.

What does that look like in an era of unmitigated climate catastrophe, the cessation of basic human rights, the deliberate choice made by nations to completely neglect their inhabitants? What would it mean to simply leave it all behind? And leave in a way that doesn’t do more damage (not via a billionaire’s climate-choking spaceship), but, rather, sets the past and one’s self free? I don’t know; but I am intrigued by this idea – and I hope you’ll join me in my departure, too. After all, the greatest asset of a choir is its sense of community; yet no choir exists without individual contribution and, perhaps, individual sacrifice. Can we have both? Autonomy and community care? Can we build a whole new world through mutual aid?

– Shruthi Rajasekar