By Billy Faires

Some famous artists are inspired by muses, but Lillian Savage ’23 was inspired by ghosts.

In the fall of 2019, she was a brand-new first-year student on campus, intrigued by all the ghost stories getting referenced and whispered about in one or another gathering. She decided to look into it.

“I did some digging in the archives of the library and found several articles and firsthand accounts of ghostly happenings at Hollins,” Savage said. And then, as the winter of her first year turned to spring, COVID-19 shut down the campus and sent students home.

“The pandemic was a cabin-fever-filled time for everyone, and it gave me ample opportunity to let the stories percolate and form into a fictional narrative surrounding Hollins culture and three popular ghost stories: the Ghost of Presser Music Hall, the Ghost of the Green Drawing Room, and the Theatre Ghost.”

Those stories became the inspiration for her senior theatre thesis, “To the Mountains.” The short musical contains seven songs, “six of which I wrote over the course of a year and a half during quarantine,” she said.

“The last song and titular track, ‘To the Mountains,’ was finished in April of 2022, and took on a life of its own, separate from the musical. It’s a song about perseverance through the metaphor of climbing a mountain, and if Hollins students know anything, it’s how to climb a mountain.”

Even if Savage wasn’t fully aware of it early on, as more Hollins ears heard the tune, there was a growing sense she had captured something even bigger. Perhaps—perhaps—not quite alma mater-level powerful, but something very close to it, a sense of timeless love for a place and its purpose infused in words that never have to say, “We love you, Hollins, oh yes we do” and yet the feeling pours through with every note.

She found herself taking on the new challenge of writing a choral version last fall, an a cappella four-part SSAA (two sopranos, two altos) piece attempting to take “inspiration from the auditory experience of being on top of a mountain, as the parts echo and layer on top of each other as a form of mountainous mimicry,” she said.

The climb to the completion of this arrangement, she soon discovered, was even more challenging than the climb to the top of Tinker.

“Songwriting and music composition are different in many aspects. Some of my challenges were creating a more complex harmonic structure, while still retaining good voice leading, and filling every moment with some form of musicality, as a cappella pieces fully rely on the voice to serve as the verbal instrumentation.”

The song became the school’s unofficial spring anthem, as it was first performed for her musical in April and then in choral performances at Honors Convocation, a recital, and then again at Commencement on Front Quad. Few expect that to be the last time the song is performed at a Hollins function, based on the feedback and the powerful emotional responses so many connected to the university have shared.

“The messaging of the song never changes no matter how it is sung,” Savage said.

(lyrics)

Lift your eyes there,
to the mountains.
We’ll be found there
by and by.
We can go there,
to the mountains,
where the tall peaks
touch the sky.
There’s a straight path
to the mountains
but it’s lined with
brush and stone.
Through the tall trees,
up the valleys
where the blue sky
meets the green and gold.
There’s a view there
kin to heaven
and every word
the angels echo.
Whatever god made
the open seas and plains,
clearly loved the mountains better.
There’s only one way
to the mountains
it’s not easy
but we try.
Keep believing
and maybe someday
you can find your strength
and learn to fly.
Though there’s rivers, rocks and
boulders, though there’s twists
and turns along the way,
when we get there
we can turn and say
that the climb’s best in sunny weather.
Lift your eyes there,
to the mountains.
We’ll be found there
by and by.
We can go there,
to the mountains,
where the tall peaks
touch the sky.

Watch performances of “To the Mountains” by scanning the QR codes: