These seven songs were written in 1999. I was particularly interested in setting metered verse with changing meters, and in a rich two-part texture. Many of them were, inevitably, concerned with loss, given the recent death of my father, and my mother’s declining health (she died shortly afterward).

The seven songs are:

“Calico Pie” by Edward Lear: on the birds, fish, and mice, who “never came back to me.”

“True Love” by Walter Ralegh: a particularly intense lyric by that intense gentleman, closing with “true loue is a durable fyre in the mynde euer burnynge; neuer sycke, neuer ould, neuer dead, from itt selfe neuer turnyng.”

“Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition” by John Keats: a denunciation of religion, and a hope for its demise.

“Sonnet 28” by Giles Fletcher the Elder: a sweet song from one of the earliest English sonneteers, set here as a canon with shifting meters.

“Ed Kistner” by Ed Kistner: an undertaker’s ad from 1925, reminding potential customers that “Ed Kistner is a very kind-hearted man, to him you can always appeal. He goes and gets his corpses at very high speed, riding in his big automobile…”

“The Silly Bee” by Robert Devereux: a bitter Elizabethan fable of disappointment at court.

“To Electra” by Robert Herrick:  a brief address to the absent lover, “to kisse that aire, that lately kissed thee.”