A Book of Songs

 A Book of Songs (tracks 1-3) is a collection of settings of works by American poets, Jorie Graham, BJ Ward, and Wallace Stevens; the pieces continue the art-song tradition inaugurated in Europe in the 19th century, expansive, formally intricate, and intensely embedded in the modernist aesthetic which replaced its rhetoric. "A Feather for Voltaire" deploys birds and flight as extended metaphors for the energy and chance-filled process, as designed aleatory generates dizzying rhythm and harmonic clashes; the poem and its song shift, language falls apart, returning to the quill of the poet at work. Mortality and loss pervade B.J. Ward's "The Apple Orchard" in October; meditative and somber, the music develops from a few cells to a more expansive being, only to be reduced again. In "Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, Et Les Unze Mille Vierges" we find shuffling of the real of the mystic, of the divine and the profane, as devotion creeps towards eros.