Rustling Flights of Wings

RUSTLING FLIGHTS OF WINGS introduces the vocal music of Stanley Grill. His work springs out of the centuries long tradition of classical art songs and epitomizes the composer’s life-long fascination with the intersection between words and music. About his many settings of poetry to music, Grill writes that “dating back into pre-history, poets and musicians have always been the ones to lift humanity up from the mundane and connect us with the deepest part of ourselves. I have always found the connection between words that go beyond words and music to be an inspiration. My favorite poets write words that seem to sing off the page and so setting their words to music is a necessary and natural response.”

There is a story behind A Collection of Songs to the Poems of C.F. Cilliers. Living in a world governed by incidental collisions, greatly multiplied by the technology of the internet, a composer sitting in his attic writing music in New Jersey crossed paths via Facebook with an extraordinary poet living in South Africa – and the two began to share their work. This cycle is the first setting of Charl Cillier’s poignant and profound poetry to music – but not the last.

The inspiration for The Violin Sings in a Common Language started years ago, with the composition of the first song in the cycle, Rilke’s Der Nachbar for the violinist and soprano Ursula Fiedler. Years later, having found other poems, all in different languages, which employ the violin as a central image, it seemed that combining these in a song cycle with violin conveyed something important about the nature of music as a shared language that can bond people together, despite our many differences.

Four Songs to Poems by Hart Crane focuses on several of his most powerful miniatures – At Melville’s Tomb, Interior, Exile and A Name for All.

The album closes with 6 Songs, setting poems by W.B. Yeats. Of all poets writing in the English language, it is perhaps true that Yeats is the most musical. His words seem to sing from the page and demand music.

CREDITS

Nancy Allen Lundy, soprano | Stephen Gosling, piano | Ralph Farris, violin and producer
Recorded, engineered and mixed by Randall Crafton at Kaleidoscope Studio, Union City, NJ.