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Sierra Boggess, Kelli O’Hara, Tituss Burgess, and several other Broadway performers are featured on Bell Tower, an upcoming album of twenty-six theatrical art songs from composer and lyricist Georgia Stitt. The album will be released on March 6 from Concord Theatricals Recordings. Pre-save it here.
The star-studded artist line up includes Kate Baldwin (Hello, Dolly!, Big Fish, Finian’s Rainbow), Sierra Boggess (The Little Mermaid, The Phantom of the Opera), Tituss Burgess (The Little Mermaid, Jersey Boys, Moulin Rouge!), Nikki Renée Daniels (Once Upon a Mattress, Company, Hamilton), Andrea Jones-Sojola (The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, The Music Man), Marc Kudisch (Girl from the North Country, Finding Neverland, Thoroughly Modern Millie), Rebecca Luker (Phantom of the Opera, The Sound of Music, The Secret Garden), Ruthie Ann Miles (The King and I, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George), Kelli O’Hara (The King and I, The Light in the Piazza, The Bridges of Madison County), and two-time GRAMMY award winner Hila Plitmann. Sheet music for Stitt’s songs will be available digitally for purchase in tandem with the album’s release on March 6.
The compositions stretch across three decades of Stitt’s career: from the “Two London Songs” written in the 1990s when she was an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, to “The Trumpet,” written in the summer of 2025.
The album takes its name from the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, set to music by Georgia Stitt for voice, piano, violin and vibraphone, here performed by soprano Hila Plitmann and nestled into the first of three collections Stitt has entitled Small Talk: A Very Short Song Cycle.
Stitt collected poetry for these three song cycles from sources spanning the New York City subway (Alicia Partnoy’s poem “Communication,” featured in an MTA ad campaign), to poetry collections (where she found works by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Dorothy Parker, Connie Bensley, and Wendy Cope), to archival gems by Sara Teasdale, Margaret Funkhouser, Lorine Niedecker, and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Stitt commissioned additional poems from friends Faye Greenberg, Angelica Chéri, Mindi Dickstein, Anika Chapin, and Ta’Rea Campbell.
The album also contains three songs performed and recorded by Stitt and Rebecca Luker before the celebrated soprano’s passing in 2020, and a new work entitled “The Trumpet” written to merge the “trumpeting voice” of Tituss Burgess and the “actual trumpeting” of Liesl Whitaker, a Broadway musician who spent two decades playing lead trumpet for the US Army Band.
“The challenge and the joy of setting poetry to music is in trying to figure out what a composer can offer that brings music to the poet’s work without getting in the way,” shares Stitt. “I’m often thinking about how music can add pacing and allow breadth, how musical comedy requires specific timing, how rhyme can set very exacting expectations, how choices about musical density can either amplify or impede a poem’s meaning, how we hear musical text differently when we’re not also reading it…I write music that is mostly in the service of words, aiming to enhance their meaning and provide an emotional invitation to signal something about my understanding to the listener.”
Bell Tower: Music by Georgia Stitt Track List
1. WHAT LIPS MY LIPS HAVE KISSED (Poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay) — Rebecca Luker
2. HUTCHINSON SONNET (Poem by Henry William Hutchinson) — Rebecca Luker
3. WHEN I AM DEAD (Poem by Christina Rossetti) — Rebecca Luker
4. THE TRUMPET (Poem by Edward Thomas) — Tituss Burgess
SMALL TALK: A VERY SHORT SONG CYCLE (PART ONE)
5. COMMUNICATION (Poem by Alicia Partnoy) — Kate Baldwin
6. ALAN’S DEAD (Poem by Faye Greenberg) — Kate Baldwin
7. THAT LOOK (Poem by Faye Greenberg) — Kate Baldwin
8. WHY I AVOID EYE-CONTACT (Poem by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz) — Kate Baldwin
9. EXTERMINATOR (Poem by Mindi Dickstein) — Kate Baldwin
10. PERMISSIVE SOCIETY (Poem by Connie Bensley) — Kate Baldwin
11. CENTRAL PARK AT DUSK (Poem by Sara Teasdale) — Kate Baldwin
12. LET THIS DARKNESS BE A BELL TOWER (Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke) — Hila Plitmann
13. LONDON (Poem by William Blake) — Marc Kudisch
14. COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE (Poem by William Wordsworth) — Marc Kudisch
SMALL TALK: A VERY SHORT SONG CYCLE (PART TWO)
15. BLOODY MEN (Poem by Wendy Cope) — Ruthie Ann Miles
16. THE TRUE NATURE OF EVIL (Poem by Anika Chapin) — Ruthie Ann Miles
17. FROM HALCYON HALL— (Poem by Margaret Funkhouser) Ruthie Ann Miles
18. A VERY SHORT SONG— (Poem by Dorothy Parker) Ruthie Ann Miles
19. THE HEART OF A WOMAN— (Poem by Georgia Douglas Johnson) Ruthie Ann Miles
20. BRIEF PASSAGE — (Poem by Sarah Ruhl) Kelli O’Hara
21. RE-CREATION — (Poem by Jacqueline Suskin) Andrea Jones-Sojola
SMALL TALK: A VERY SHORT SONG CYCLE (PART THREE)
22. WHAT HORROR TO AWAKE AT NIGHT (Poem by Lorine Niedecker) — Sierra Boggess
23. TECTONIC PLATES — (Poem by Angelica Chéri) Sierra Boggess
24. MASKED BEHAVIOR — (Poem by Ta’Rea Campbell) Sierra Boggess
25. SMALL TALK — (Poem by Mindi Dickstein) Sierra Boggess
26. HOLD FAST YOUR DREAMS (Poem by Louise Driscoll) — Nikki Renée Daniels
