The Sound of Poe: Why the Composers Behind This Ballet Matter

When audiences enter The Curious Life of Edgar Allan Poe, they are not just stepping into Poe’s stories. They are stepping into a carefully built sonic world.

One of the most meaningful things about that world is this: so much of the music shaping Poe comes from women and BIPOC composers, voices that have too often been sidelined in conversations about classical music, even while their work has helped define its emotional depth, daring, and beauty.

That matters to us.

Poe is a ballet about grief, imagination, fracture, longing, and moral awakening. It needed a musical language that could hold complexity. It needed composers who know how to write beauty without sentimentality, darkness without emptiness, and intensity without losing tenderness. That is part of what drew us toward this body of music. It is also showing a clear commentary to the viewer that Poe’s world is built on the unseen labor of enslaved people and women.

In the inspiration world around Poe, you can hear composers such as Clara Schumann, Florence Price, Amy Beach, Adolphus Hailstork, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Gabriela Lena Frank, Kwame Akansah-Brew, and Rebekka Karijord. These are not token additions or decorative references. They help shape the emotional architecture of the piece. They widen the atmosphere. They deepen the questions. They make the world of the ballet feel larger, richer, and more human.

There is also something important about refusing the narrow idea of what “Poe” should sound like.

A work inspired by Edgar Allan Poe could easily lean toward the expected: gothic, familiar, male, European, canonical in the most predictable sense. But that would flatten the project. Our approach has been different. We are interested in building a world that is haunted, yes, but also alive with cultural breadth, historical complexity, and unexpected resonance.

Women composers bring extraordinary emotional intelligence and structural invention to this landscape. BIPOC composers bring distinct histories, textures, and ways of hearing the world that expand what the ballet can hold. Together, these voices help us create a score that does not just accompany the choreography. It challenges it, lifts it, and reveals new dimensions inside it.

That choice reflects Ballet 5:8’s larger artistic values. We care about excellence. We care about beauty. We also care about whose voices shape the stage, whose artistry gets named, and whose brilliance audiences are invited to encounter.

So when you hear the music of Poe, you are hearing more than atmosphere. You are hearing a curatorial choice. You are hearing lineage, recovery, and imagination. You are hearing a commitment to a wider, truer canon.