2026
for
Spoken Word and String Quartet
Steven Mackey is an American composer and electric guitarist whose concert music draws on rock and blues. A longtime Princeton professor, he has written for orchestras, chamber ensembles, and the stage. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Mackey develops musical ideas from the story’s text, shaping their relationships according to the flow of the music.
Steven Mackey is an American composer and electric guitarist whose work brings the energy of rock and blues into concert music. Born in Frankfurt in 1956 and raised in Northern California, he studied music at the University of California, Davis, Stony Brook University, and Brandeis University, where he earned his doctorate. He joined Princeton’s faculty in 1985 and became professor emeritus in 2026. His music includes orchestral works, chamber music, and music for the stage, often incorporating the electric guitar as a concert instrument. He has performed with the Kronos Quartet and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Stoeger Prize. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2024.
The Frog Prince and Iron Henry is a story included in the Grimm Brothers’ first collection of “Children’s and Household Tales” from 1812. Many of the elements are quite familiar from various retellings. There is no more familiar trope or universal allegory than the once handsome Prince who is turned into a frog by a witch’s curse. However, the original Grimm Brothers story has some striking divergences from the more recent retellings.
I like telling stories with music or put another way, I like arranging musical elements to trace an ebb and flow of energy and emotion similar to that of following a story. The narrative could be based on an existing story such as The Frog Prince or Iron Henry or merely create the rhetoric of a story in the abstract.
Fairy tales are particularly appealing musical instigators for several reasons: They often have strange creatures, magic, and fantastical imagery that can nudge my musical imagination. The familiar ritualized repetition, often occurring in threes – three wishes, three tasks, etc. – translates well into musical form. There is often the possibility of interesting interactions between diegetic sounds that the characters would hear – the splash of water or the croaking of a frog – and non-diegetic sound that represents the inner life of the characters.
Long time Naumburg Foundation President Robert Mann shared my interest in storytelling and collaborated with his wife – actress Lucy Rowan Mann – to create settings of fairy tales with string quartet. It is a touching tribute to the stewardship of Robert and Lucy Mann that their son, current Naumburg President Nicholas Mann, honored me with the request to mark this occasion by contributing to their legacy with a fairy tale scored for narrator and string quartet.
Finally, I am thrilled that this project gives me an excuse to compose for some of my absolute dearest colleagues, Lucy Shelton and the Brentano String Quartet.
