A Book of Songs

A Book of Songs is a collection of settings of works by American poets Jorie Graham, BJ Ward, and Wallace Stevens "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 and the mystic, of the divine and the profane, as devotion creeps towards eros.