NEW YORK, NY.- “Violent congestion, inexpressible terror, failure of breath, momentary unconsciousness — these overtake me in quick succession, though I am better than I was,” composer Robert Schumann wrote in a letter to his mother in 1833. He was 23, and the recent deaths of his older brother and sister-in-law surely cast a pall on his state of mind. “If you had any notion of the lethargy into which melancholia has brought me,” he continued, “you would forgive my not writing.”

Hannah Kendall, a prominent young British composer based in New York, was struck by that passage a little more than a year ago, while reading Schumann’s letters, which provide glimpses of a decades-long struggle with mental illness, diagnosed during his life as exhaustion, and posthumously as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

“It felt as though there was a very direct, personal connection to his state at the time, which I found particularly fascinating as a composer,” Kendall, 40, said in a recent interview at Lincoln Center — where her new work, “He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing,” will premiere Aug. 9. The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center will play Kendall’s piece on a program that also includes Schumann’s Second Symphony.

What it takes to be an artist today, Kendall explained, is a regular topic of discussion among her circle of friends and peers. “Our well-being, mental and physical, is something that crops up on a daily basis,” she said. Some composers, like Julia Adolphe, Nico Muhly and Aaron Helgeson, have begun to air mental-health concerns and struggles in public, in blog posts and on podcasts.

Kendall was urged to read Schumann’s letters by a longtime friend, conductor Jonathon Heyward, the music director of the Festival Orchestra, who admittedly had an ulterior motive. For his first summer with the ensemble, he had her commissioned to write a piece for a concert that would also feature Schumann. He envisioned Kendall responding to not only Schumann’s music, but also issues of mental health and this moment when performing arts organizations are still struggling to lure back audiences lost during the pandemic.

The coming program, which also includes two works by Johann Sebastian Bach, is surrounded by contextual offerings. “Ghost Variations,” an augmented-reality installation piece in the lobby at David Geffen Hall, explores how Schumann found solace in Bach’s music. And a preconcert discussion will address the question “Can music express mental health?”

Kendall’s title, taken from the Book of Job, attests to an omnipotent, unknowable God. “It’s probably not the thing to read if you’re in a depressive state,” she said, “but it just felt like the perfect way in, because it somehow encapsulates this feeling of being in a void, and not necessarily finding any way out.”

The phrase also reminded her of Jupiter, the Roman god of the sky and thunder, and a reference to the piece’s future: The Swiss ensemble Musikkollegium Winterthur, which co-commissioned it, is programming it alongside Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony.

During a recent rehearsal, Kendall’s 11-minute score offered a sound world well suited to its uncanny inspirations. In addition to standard instruments made to murmur, buzz and wail with extended techniques, Kendall also used unorthodox tools: Melodies by Mozart twinkled from music boxes amplified by a snare drum; harmonicas warbled throughout the orchestra, some players blowing two at once. Might the disembodied voice barking passages from Job through walkie-talkies represent God’s commandments, or imaginary voices in someone’s head? Neither was intended, Kendall said, but both made sense.

Her use of such techniques and implements is part of a distinctive personal vocabulary, refined in several recent works that have elicited high-profile advocacy. In May, the New York Philharmonic performed her 2022 work “shouting forever into the receiver,” whose title came from poet Ocean Vuong, but whose texts came from the Book of Revelation. A new recording by the London Symphony Orchestra, whose chief conductor Antonio Pappano is a keen supporter of Kendall’s, pairs her 2023 piece “O Flower of Fire” with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.

“Her sound world was new to me and it is all her own, often using everyday implements such as combs to pluck, strum, caress phrases that can be hypnotically static and then feverishly dramatic,” Pappano said in an email. “Hannah was originally a singer, and I feel strongly her dramatic sense, her ability to conjure unusual atmospheres. But the listener and the performer must be alert, available for the tumultuous, strange and unpredictable journey ahead.”

Kendall’s own journey began in Wembley, a suburb in northwest London, where she was born. Her grandfather was a jazz musician; the household was filled with music, dance and drama, and at the behest of her mother, a first-generation Guyanese immigrant, she took up the violin at 4, the piano at 7 and voice lessons at 14.

Kendall majored in voice and composition at the University of Exeter, and then earned a master’s degree in composition at the Royal College of Music, while also studying arts management at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. (“As a composer it’s incredibly helpful for me to understand press and marketing and fundraising, as I’m likely to have to do it for myself,” she told The Guardian in 2018.) For much of the past six years, she has been in New York, where she completed her doctorate at Columbia University in March.

She already had a growing profile by the time she arrived in the United States, bolstered by a handful of awards and a high-profile premiere: Chineke!, England’s first majority-Black orchestra, gave the world premiere of her buoyant, ambiguous piece “The Spark Catchers” in a 2017 BBC Proms concert.

What drew her to Columbia, she said, was the opportunity to study with two eminent composers, Georg Friedrich Haas and George E. Lewis. The way she uses harmonicas in her recent orchestral works, including “He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing,” reflects ideas she refined with both teachers.

“The fact that those instruments are associated with the blues and Afro-diasporic music — I’m trying to find ways to ‘creolize’ sound within orchestral settings,” Kendall said. “What are the resulting sound worlds that might come from bringing together the Euro-logical and Afro-logical?”

For example, she attached dreadlock cuffs to stringed instruments — “Afro hair objects,” she said, “that prepare these iconic European instruments, that transform the sound and change what you expect those instruments to do.”

Having a single musician play two harmonicas at the same time evolved from an assignment that Haas presented in an orchestration class. “Is a unison in an orchestral or instrumental context ever really a true unison?” Kendall recalled Haas asking. “And if it isn’t, how can we play with that?”

Inspired by that prompt, Kendall asked musicians to clasp two harmonicas together in a vertical position and play them both at once. “If you’re asking one janky harmonica, from wherever it’s come from, to blend timbrally with another harmonica that’s playing — that’s kind of cool,” she said.

“If you layer the pitches on top of each other, are they ever really unison? No,” she added. “So you expand this notion of what unison is, and what pitch material is.” Having those same harmonica players create a wah-wah effect by waving one hand was a flourish inspired by Lewis’ notion of musical adornment.

For Heyward, who conducted the U.S. premiere of “The Spark Catchers” with the Seattle Symphony in 2019, the distance from that piece to Kendall’s latest works provides a dramatic view of how she has developed a style specific enough to recognize from piece to piece. But it’s also flexible; in “He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing,” she puts her vocabulary in perceptive, sympathetic conversation with Schumann.

“It’s important for us to reflect upon this journey that Schumann had to deal with as an artist,” Heyward said in a video interview. “We can all relate to an inner struggle in our life, whether it’s a severe mental health difficulty or not, and that relatability, when we’re talking about his music, is important. Of course, it was not all dark and deep and filled with void, which I think Hannah portrays in the lightness of the music boxes, the light happiness that we hear towards the end of the work.”

Her music could also help audience members to hear Schumann’s familiar music in a new way. “Whilst we listen to this wonderfully bright, cheerful symphony,” Heyward said, “we don’t want to forget the struggle that I think Hannah portrays in a really thoughtful and meaningful way.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.