Jeff Beal's The Paper Lined Shack

For American composer Jeff Beal, finding a strong female voice to set to music for the fierce soprano Hilá Plitmann ultimately led to The Paper Lined Shack, a song cycle for soprano and orchestra using texts from his great-grandmother’s memoirs, excerpted and arranged by Joan Beal. These reflections of her life at the turn of the 20th century in Idaho, recently widowed and raising her six children in a single-room shack, spoke to Beal in a very personal way, and he began composing the piece for Plitmann in a commission by the St. Louis Symphony and conductor Leonard Slatkin. 

This June, a recording of The Paper Lined Shack will be released on Supertrain Records on an album also featuring Things Unseen performed by the New Hollywood String Quartet. This program is a world premiere chamber arrangement of The Paper Lined Shack for Plitmann and the New Hollywood, conducted by Beal himself, in a performance featuring projections of images, now more than a century old, from these memoirs.

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