A MOTHER’S WORDS, A SON’S MUSIC: A new CD by composer and Princeton University Professor Steven Mackey, right, narrated by actor Natalie Christa Rakes, left, is about to be released. “Memoir,” inspired by Mackey’s late mother Elaine Mackey, drops officially on August 16.

By Anne Levin

Among the many artistic endeavors that were derailed by the pandemic, and are finally coming to fruition, is a musical work by composer and Princeton University music professor Steven Mackey. Memoir, a 75-minute piece for a narrator, the Dover String Quartet, and the percussionists known as arx duo, is about to be released as a CD.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Mackey said of the work, which is based on an unpublished memoir by his late mother, Elaine Mackey. “The original premiere date was supposed to be May 2020. So obviously that couldn’t happen. But now we’re ready to go.”

As director of the Edward T. Cone Composition Institute at Princeton and a member of the composition faculty at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, Mackey is a Grammy Award-winning composer of works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance, and opera. His music has been performed by the BBC Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, among others. He and the musicians took Memoir on the road before making the CD.

Its narrator, Natalie Christa Rakes, is an actor who happens to have been the longtime nanny for the children of Mackey and his wife, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider. With the kids grown, Rakes now serves as Mackey’s assistant.

“How it all came about is an interesting story in itself,” Mackey said. “I would give Natalie little bits of text to read, for timing. It turns out that the register of her voice is very similar to my mother’s. They are both from Pennsylvania, which might have something to do with it. But I had no thought of hiring her for the piece.”

An arts festival in Arkansas had commissioned the work. “They had a connection to the actor Mary Steenburgen, who was sort of the right age for it,” Mackey said. “But after I made a tape using little clips of Natalie saying the text on top of a computer mockup of the string quartet, everybody loved her voice and her acting. So we said, ‘Let’s do it.’ She is an experienced performer, so it wasn’t a huge stretch for her. But it was kind of a discovery. And we wouldn’t have been able to afford Mary Steenburgen.”

Mackey describes Memoir as “a little smidge of Forrest Gump. My mother was born in 1920 and died in 2007. It’s about her perspective on the 20th century, with a lot of passing details and reflections on events of the century — World War II, and lots of personal challenges — and how they affected her.”

The dramatic arc of the piece is his mother’s alcoholism.

“She was very shy, and didn’t even take her first drink until she moved to L.A. and married a musician, who was her first husband,” Mackey said. “One of the crucial things about the piece is that it culminates in a story where I go through the house while she’s sleeping, and confiscate all the bottles of vodka, and then go out and get food so when she wakes up, she’ll have something to eat,” he said. “But she wakes up before I get back, and goes out to buy more vodka. She ends up falling flat on her face in the parking lot. This was a small town in northern California. And there was a picture of her lying there, in the local paper. That was her rock bottom. She never took another drink and was sober for the next 30 years. I think the key line is when I say that throughout her life, alcohol was the cure for her embarrassment. And ironically, embarrassment became the cure for her alcohol.”

Memoir also has more upbeat stories about Elaine’s childhood, and her move to Los Angeles during the golden age of Hollywood. “My entire life, my mother has been a supporting character in my music,” Mackey said.

Composing the piece, Mackey wanted to keep things relatable. “My mother was a secretary,” he said. “She never went to college. So the language is simple and candid. As an over-educated composer, I have developed a more complicated musical language. I wanted to find a place that was more innocent to really set her words. Once I got that down, it was really fun, and had a kind of lasting impact on my music.”

Memoir is essentially a theatrical piece, which Mackey and musicians performed on tour in five locations across the country. “After that, we figured, ‘We know it now,’ and had the recording sessions at Curtis and at Princeton. We’re hoping the CD will get more interest and we can go out on the road again,” he said.

The work is unique, Mackey said, because it can’t be classified as chamber music, opera, or anything else. “There really isn’t anything like it,” he said.

Memoir will be available on August 16 on all streaming platforms and for purchase through @bridgerecords.