Jane at the piano

Laura Kwon is a senior English major and Honors student at Pacific Union College (Angwin, CA) who recently completed her final Honors project, for which she composed a piano piece inspired by Jane Eyre.

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“It was more difficult than I thought to write music based on a plot that’s already been written,” she admits. “I usually tend to just improvise and create a melody out of that, but it was actually quite fun to take on the challenge.”
Kwon has been playing piano since the age of five, and has grown up creating and composing at the keyboard whenever could. When she took “Victorian Literature in Britain” last year, Kwon felt compelled to delve more into Jane Eyre, crediting her professor, Dr. Linda Gill, with her interest, saying Dr. Gill “can transform boring rocks into blooming, fragrant flowers in her classes.”
As she contemplated her senior thesis, Kwon hit upon a unique idea: “I thought it would be fun to connect my English major side with my musical side,” she says.
She was right.
On Thursday, Nov. 29, Kwon performed her original composition for professors, classmates, and other interested parties. It was her final presentation of her Honors program, in the choir room in Paulin Hall.
The composition has five movements, representing the five main themes Kwon determined through several readings of the novel: Gateshead Hall, Lowood School, Thornfield, the Moor House, and Ferndean.
“Jane Eyre is a passionate bildungsroman that weaves romance into a continual questioning of gender, class roles, and a plethora of other societal issues,” Kwon explains. “Because there are so many ideas, it’s pretty impossible to squish every single piece of rhetorical commentary into a ten-minute piano piece, but I tried to outline the five main themes of the novel as the focus of my composition.”
Along with her composition and performance, Kwon also produced a 12-page thesis paper. While preparing these final products, Kwon read Jane Eyre more times than she can count, and spent hours painstakingly placing her composition into MuseScore to create printed sheet music.
“Interestingly enough, I gathered the same emotions and themes every time I read it,” she says. “I had been hoping to discover different emotional notes with different readings, but because my viewpoint was limited, I was able to create more literary analyses each time instead of musical analyses.”
Kwon says her end goal was to ultimately create a piece she could say accurately depicts her interpretation of Jane Eyre.
“As I worked on my project, I think I ended up hoping to prove words and music are two completely different topics,” she recalls, “but they can be connected through parallel emotions. I think I was able to do that—and hopefully my audience agreed with me!” (Becky St. Clair)