Recorded by Drew Minter and David Alpher on my CD January.
 
These songs are inspired by Romanticism but are not meant to be pastiches.  Nonetheless, I have allowed my ear to paint them with the proper qualities demanded by the text. My experience with troubadour song, 17th century monody, the exquisite English vocal music of Henry Purcell and Benjamin Britten, and most obviously, the chansons of Faure and Debussy, were other influences on my thin.  Each of the songs is based on feelings of regret or loss.  In “If by dull rhymes” Keats speaks of the loss of creativity due to the chains of convention, looking back instead to the admonitions of Horace; Baudelaire’s “La musique” praises music for its ability to free us from the universal will and its pain, but ends with the anguish of knowing such pain endures eternally; Verlaine’s surrender to the ebb and flow beyond himself is only outmatched by the utter devastation felt in Alfred de Musset’s “Tristesse”.  In Wilde’s “Theoretikos” I found political rant that could have been written in response to our own media culture of demagoguery and prejudice – both cultures suffer from a loss of social cohesion and compassion. These songs were written for my esteemed colleague and mentor Drew Minter.