The Amherst performance coincides with the release of a new recording of Gordon Getty's settings of Dickinson poems to music In 1986. Getty composed The White Election after close reflection on Emily Dickinson's 1862 poetic declaration "Mine --- by the Right of the White Election! Mine - by the Grave's Repeal! Title - Confirmed! Delirious Charter! Mine-long as Ages steal!" The song cycle explores themes of mortality, renunciation and fulfillment through a selection of Dickinson's work and classical music. Concert performances and the original recording 20 years ago by the late Kaaren Erickson of The White Election have been highly praised and the song cycle has taken its place in the classical song canon.

 
Delan is recognized worldwide for her versatility and breadth of accomplishment in opera, song and recording. Critics have praised her depiction of Joan of Arc in another Gordon Getty composition, Joan and the Bells, as "Beautifully sung and 'refreshingly unpretentious.'" Her recording of The White Election with pianist Fritz Steinegger will be released in April 2009.

 
Pankonin, performs regularly throughout the San Francisco area and has performed as both a soloist and collaborator under the auspices of the Old First Church concerts, Mills College Concert Series and the Latin Chamber Music Society.

 
Of the inspiration for his work, Getty has noted the fact that Dickinson had studied voice and piano, and played at home. A friend of the poet remembered that on her father's visits to the Dickinson home, he "would be awakened from his sleep by heavenly music. Emily would explain in the morning, 'I can improvise better at night.'"  Another visitor recalled that Emily was "often at the piano playing weird and beautiful melodies, all from her own inspiration." Emily herself told a friend, "I play the old, odd tunes yet, which used to fit about your head after honest hours." Getty has remarked that "all this inspires the conjecture that Emily may have set her own poems to music, or even conceived of some of them as songs in the first place. I have set them, in large part, just as Emily might have if her music had found a balance between tradition and iconoclasm something like that in her poems."

 
The April 18 performance of The White Election falls under the Emily Dickinson Museum's spring program in connection with The Big Read, funded by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.