What do flowers do at night?
German composer Sophia Jani grew up in Bavaria and is based primarily in Munich. A pianist, she studied in France after high school before returning to Germany, where she earned a degree in economics from the University of Augsburg before earning degrees in music there and at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich. She received a Fulbright Fellowship that allowed her to study at Yale University with David Lang and Martin Bresnick, but her first encounters there took place remotely during the 2020 pandemic. She was able to travel to the U.S. for the first time in summer 2021 and earned her master’s degree from Yale the following year. Also in 2022, she participated in the Edward T. Cone Composition Institute hosted by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in collaboration with Princeton University. It was during that experience that her 2018 orchestral work What do flowers do at night?—her first foray writing for orchestra—was premiered publicly. The piece has also been performed by Fabio Luisi and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, where Jani became Composer in Residence for a three-year term starting in 2023. Among her most recent works is her Violin Concerto, commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which premiered it with the American violinist Melissa White as soloist this past February under Tabitha Berglund’s direction. In addition to the Dallas and New Jersey symphony orchestras, Jani’s music has been played by the Pittsburgh and Albany symphony orchestras, the Munich Philharmonic, the Goldmund and Barbican string quartets, and the Kontai Ensemble, which recorded an album of her chamber music.
Jani worked in film music in her Munich studies and has extensive experience with composing in a computer/electronic music studio. She has said that her initial goals as a composer involved, in a sense, counterbalancing the extreme virtuosity and complexity she encountered in her study of the Romantic piano literature. The transparency and outward simplicity of her early music drew her to the work of such composers as Meredith Monk and her Yale professor David Lang. She was also open to other genres of music, including rock.
The intimacy of the studio setting and working with individual musicians profoundly affected Jani’s overall approach to composition, even in larger works. Her Six Pieces for Solo Violin, a 40-minute cycle composed in close association of violinist Teresa Allgaier, evolved from the isolation of the pandemic. Allgaier recorded the cycle for an album released in 2024. Much of Jani’s work explores the special conditions of musical time, often through repetition and the incremental change of small details. Her String Quartet No. 1, See the grass is full of stars, relies on harmonic progressions not too distant from those of pop music, with the intricacy of timbre and the specifics of playing techniques for the strings creating a rich sonic environment.
Sophia Jani on What do flowers do at night?:
What do flowers do at night? was inspired by a plant called Selenicereus grandiflorus, a cactus species that blooms in a beautiful way, but only once a year for one night. The charged, mysterious mood that comes with the anticipation of a unique event served as the starting point and form-giver for this work, and the beauty and elegance of the blossom, seemingly created so effortlessly by nature, served as an inspiration for me in crafting my composition.
The piece is a single, ten-minute span. The opening arpeggio, beginning with a solo clarinet and opening into the orchestra’s other sections, is the kernel from which the whole grows. The gesture transforms on each recurrence, colored by details of orchestration, while remaining clearly identifiable. A pulse, a tentative heartbeat, in the middle of the piece has the effect of suspending time. The arpeggio idea returns and the pulse becomes strong but sporadic punctuation. Quiet, delicate sounds create an aura around the music in the foreground.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.