The Bird is an Alphabet
For the American composer Douglas Boyce, writing music is an act of philosophising. Each of the recent vocal chamber works gathered on this album revolves around a distinctive stylistic orientation and scoring. The effect is not merely an array of varying sound environments but an interrogation of the nature of language – musical and verbal, and the potential interlockings between these conduits of meaning – along with its limits and liberations.
The Bird is an Alphabet is an album of new settings of American poets (Jorie Graham, BJ Ward, Wallace Stevens, Melissa Range, and Marlanda Dekine). All the poems are interrogations of language, of the word, and its role in life, and in the creative life; the music draws upon art-song, medieval music, modernist chamber music, and the energy and freedom of hip-hop. The album takes its title from one of the poems I have set, A Feather for Voltaire by Jorie Graham, in which the images presented in the poem become part of contemplation on the act of writing: poetic, grammatical, orthographic, and philosophical.
In toto, the album connects to many themes of my work; A Book of Songs (recorded by tenor Robert Baker (tenor) and Molly Orlando (piano)) links the European 19th-century art-song tradition of technical virtuosity and poetic ekphrasis with the explosive excession of Modernism. Scriptorium, written for Byrne:Kozar:Duo, sets four poems by Melissa Range (Lawrence University) puts forward an evocation of the medieval ars veterum practices, but more severe in its result. Ars Poetica was written for counter)induction and the poet, Marlanda Dekine, and provides musical spaces for the spoken performance of her poetry of personal history, and cultural emplotment.
To hear thoughts from my collaborators on the album, CLICK HERE
