Elijah Hall (BM ’26, composition, percussion), a recent SMTD graduate and current graduate student lecturer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has been named the winner of the 2026 Brehm Prize in Choral Composition for his piece a formal feeling. This honor includes a cash prize and the opportunity for the winner’s piece to be performed in concert by one of SMTD’s choirs. The premiere of a formal feeling will be presented by the Chamber Choir on Thursday, October 8, in Hill Auditorium, at 8:00 p.m.
Elijah Hall
The Brehm Prize in Choral Composition – established and generously funded in 2011 by William (BS ‘50, MS ‘52) and Delores Brehm – is open exclusively to students in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance (SMTD). The competition, overseen by Eugene Rogers, professor of music and SMTD’s director of university choirs, aims to encourage innovation and to award choral composers who work to push the genre to greater heights. Hall’s a formal feeling unconventionally pairs percussion with choral composition. The choral repertoire for percussive instruments remains relatively new, in comparison to other instruments. “[Percussion] spans so many sonic palettes and yet it isn’t often used to color contemporary choral music,” Hall remarked. “I wondered [for] a long time when I’d get to pair these textures together.”
Hall’s piece is based on Emily Dickinson’s poem “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” In her poem, Dickinson used imagery such as “nerves, sitting like tombs” and “feet, mechanical going round”,which influenced Hall’s musical expression. Rogers stated that “Hall draws remarkable musical expression from the poem’s imagery and emotional depth,” and described Hall’s harmonic language as “…at times cold, crunchy, and hauntingly beautiful, immediately drawing the listener into Dickinson’s stark and mysterious world.” Dickinson’s writing struck a chord with Hall, who said, “as someone who has struggled with mental health obstacles like depersonalization, I felt the poem had really reached me and invited me to set it to music.”