Stephanie Smittle is a vocalist and autoharpist raised in Northwest Arkansas, now residing in Little Rock. She recently came to the Carver Center for Public Radio in Fayetteville to perform songs from her most recent album release, "Passiontide," and to speak with Ozarks at Large's Sophia Nourani as part of a live session series. Stephanie says growing up in small town Arkansas, going to church on Sundays was her first introduction to music.
Smittle: Very much like my music DNA and like my chordal, as in the chords, DNA is really tied to like the Baptist hymnal. So that was sort of my first introduction to like, here's a cadence, here's how the harmony goes, you know. And it really, those tunes wrote themselves into my brain.
So I'm told. I don't remember this, but I'm told that my first experience singing in church was in, I was singing what in a Baptist service would be called the special, right? They would call, oh, she's going to sing the special? And so I got up to sing, and it was clear that, like, I was apparently too little to be seen over the modesty rail. So there's like a, you know, a rail with little curtain in the front of the stage. So they got me a stool.
And I think it just stuck, you know. From then, I discovered opera. Actually discovered opera right here in Fayetteville. I was a high school kid. I kind of grew up not far from here in Cave Springs, but very much grew up going to what was then George Cole Field, learning how to keep score at the baseball game here. And somewhere in that mix I began taking some voice lessons and my voice teacher took me to see "Dialogues of the Carmelites" by Francis Poulenc at the Tulsa Opera. And I was smitten. I think probably I just heard that and thought, oh, I want to do something like that, you know. Just the epic scale. Opera has a way of like never dealing with the small stuff. It seems like it always deals with the big stuff. And I love that. I feel a kinship to that.
Nourani: Yeah. Thank you for that. And, you know, eventually you had the electric autoharp become part of your work as a musician. Maybe tell me about when you first began intertwining those and what that's been like and what it's like working with that instrument.
Smittle: Sure. Well, it's a feisty instrument. This is 36 strings. I like to think of it as a very democratic and accessible instrument because it's really pushing buttons. You know, if I hold my autoharp and I want to play a C major, I can simply strum. My autoharp is going to do the work of ruling out all the notes that do not belong in that chord. So that's why you see the autoharp often use, like teachers will use it, music teachers, for elementary school classes. It's also been a classic instrument of protest because it's really easy to mobilize people through music when you have something very, very simple that people can latch on to. And this instrument has a way of doing that really well.
I found it really just as an excuse to accompany myself. I'm, you know, not an instrumentalist. I'm a vocalist first. And my primary instrument is the one I carry right here. And whenever the great pandemic pause introduced itself and it became apparent that I was not going to be able to collaborate with some of my colleagues during that time, which I thought like, oh gosh, it could be weeks, it could be all summer, you know. I had no idea the sort of lasting impact. But what I did know is that I had less interest in figuring out how to make sourdough bread than I did having a musical adventure. So I bought an autoharp on eBay and songs just started pouring out.
Nourani: Yeah. Well, tell me about "Passiontide," the process that went behind that and kind of how that began and your inspiration for it.
Smittle: Sure. "Passiontide" is named for the two weeks in the liturgical year right before Lent. It's a time in the liturgical calendar when things are very dark. They're very uncertain. Things are veiled and ambiguous. And that is like, in a nutshell, how I feel when I look at the state of the world right now. And so I took that name from that period and in the church calendar. It sounded, that all sounds really heavy, but there is some lightness and whimsy on the record too.
Nourani: Yeah. So when did you first begin recording and writing for that LP?
Smittle: Yeah, it's a collection of songs that's come about. Some of them are quite new, you know, maybe written in the last year, year and a half, two years. There's one song on the record called "Haven't Met Mine" that has been rattling around my brain for, I think maybe a decade. And so it's a collection that's both old and new.
Nourani: Yes. Yeah. And how do you feel like this compares to your previous work? Like, how do you feel when you look back on that versus what you're doing now?
Smittle: Oh, I don't know. I guess I'll leave that up to my friends who listen to the record to say that. How can we ever tell how we change, right? Like we're always changing and we're so in it that it's hard for me to like, listen to my first record and think, oh, definitely, I've moved in this direction.
What I would say is that I feel like "Passiontide" is perhaps a little, leans a little bit more toward the operatic, a little bit more toward the baroque. I am in, you know, my, elsewhere in my singing life, I am a singer of baroque, sacred choral works. So Bach, Handel, you know, these things are near and dear to my heart. And I think there's some of that sensibility in the record, even though there are not Bach like melisma passages or anything. But I feel like my fellow sacred choral singers will hear the record and have heard the record and said, oh, yeah, it's baked in there.
That was me, Sophia Nourani, speaking with Stephanie Smittle as part of KUAF live session series. The full KUAF live session interview and performance will be live on the KUAF YouTube channel this Friday.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
