Douglas Boyce: The Bird is an Alphabet

Just another digital release of a living composer with strange squeaky music?

No, please don’t make that erroneous assumption while contemplating the lovely cover art of The Bird is an Alphabet, a new album of works by American composer Douglas Boyce. This is top artistry from every point of view.

Boyce’s compositions often feature intricate textures, unconventional harmonies, and a willingness to explore new sonic possibilities. His work reflects a deep engagement with contemporary musical techniques while pushing stylistic boundaries and challenging traditional norms, but he also finds inspiration in Medieval and Renaissance traditions.

His use of dissonance and unique rhythmic structures adds complexity to his pieces, creating a distinct and innovative musical language. Boyce is also recognized for his attention to timbral details, creating rich and nuanced sonic landscapes within his works. Overall, his style goes far over the usual avant-garde composers, even if, in some works, he has a certain affinity to Dallapiccola and Berio.

But let us see the compositions in detail.

First of all, this album is blessed by the presence of two top voices: Robert Baker, a well-known tenor with an impressive list of world premiere recordings, and soprano Corinne Byrne, rightly famous for the ease with which she tackles the greatest difficulties of intonation and extension.

In the 17 tracks, we can follow three works, the first called A Book of Songs. Set for a tenor and piano, it divides itself into three movements: “A Feather for Voltaire,” “The Apple Orchard in October,” and “Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule Et les Unze Mille Vierges.” This last complicated title in medieval French probably comes from a legend about the martyrdom of Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand followers at the hands of the Huns. [1]

The music is spectacular, a real showcase for the pianist Molly Orlando, far beyond the usual in terms of technical difficulties. As said, the immensely expressive voice of Robert Baker adds much to the charm of this score. In the last movement, some extra-musical sources of piano sound are used, like chord rapping, glissandi on the soundboard, and similar effects. Here the danger of doing so only for the sake of a nice gadget is great, but fully avoided by the composer, who uses them in a very poetic way. This work is definitely the best of the album.

A four-part composition called Scriptorium follows. Here, we have the chance to listen to the equally charming voice of Corinne Byrne. Versatile, very attractive in the low register, but extraordinary in the highest notes, which she reaches without any apparent effort.

The four parts, “Tyrian Purple,” “Orpiment,” “Lampblack,” and “Verdigris,” are quite unique in style and perfectly accompanied by the trumpet playing of Andrew Kozar. Here again, the composer reaches the seemingly impossible task of creating a viable harmonic support out of a trumpet, an instrument of not so many expressive possibilities. The first part will leave you guessing what instrument it might be to produce such intriguing sounds.

The final work, on tracks 8 to 16, is Ars Poetica. Here, we can follow the poet Marlanda Dekine recite five of her short works: “Wilderness,” “Returning,” “Out there,” “Reclamation,” and “Risk.” All these quite short miniatures are interspersed by four purely instrumental intermezzi. The quite monotonous voice of Ms. Dekine may not be the best choice to bring this per se good poetry to life; maybe a good actress would be a better choice. Violinist Nurit Pacht, guitarist Daniel Lippel, and cellist Caleb van der Swaagh provide the accompaniment. They are doing their best but are a hint too disorganized to be really impressive.

So all in all, this is a fine way to discover the intimate and refined inner world of the composer Douglas Boyce, whose music probably never will be considered in the mainstream music industry but certainly deserves to be known to aficionados of 21st-century music.

— Mark Gresham, 12.09.2023

From Washington, D.C. composer Douglas Boyce, The Bird Is an Alphabet is an album of three sets of works for voice in various settings. For one of these sets Boyce has chosen the conventional voice-and-piano setting, while the other two feature more unusual orchestrations. The first three tracks are taken from Boyce’s A Book of Songs, scored for tenor voice and piano (on this recording, Robert Baker and Molly Orlando, respectively), which sets texts by various poets and philosophers. The three pieces included here are well within the tradition of Western art song and feature poems by Jorie Graham, Wallace Stevens, and B. J. Ward. On Ward’s contribution, “The Apple Orchard in October,” Boyce elicits an autumnal mood by framing the text in dark harmonies and drawing the words out in long, brooding lines. Scriptorium, a setting of four texts from poet Melissa Range’s 2016 book of that title, was written for the duo of soprano Corrine Byne and trumpeter Andy Kozar – a challengingly spare combination of voices. Boyce’s scoring, which alludes to the modality and contrapuntalism of early music, not only effectively exploits the possibilities available to two single-line instruments, but fittingly matches the medieval theme that informs Range’s poetry. Range’s own graceful handling of language’s consonances and fluid rhythms would seem to lend itself to melodic writing and plays no small part in the success of these pieces. The final set of pieces is Ars Poetica, written for the fine contemporary chamber ensemble counter)induction (Daniel Lippel, guitar; Nurit Pacht, violin; Caleb van der Swaagh, cello) and poet Marlanda Dekine. This nine-part work consists of five settings of Dekine’s poems, read here by the poet, alternating with four instrumental interludes. Boyce underscores the drama and rhetorical force of Dekine’s words by contrasting the poet’s evenly measured speech rhythms with the ensemble’s darting along in skittish counterpoint or breaking up into fragmentary motifs.

— Daniel Barbiero, 12.22.2023

Having three newly recorded pieces by Boyce is something to celebrate for sure, and his modernist Medievalism (or is that Medieval modernism?) sounds fantastic on this well-conceived grouping. A Book Of Songs (2019) opens the album in charming fashion, with tenor Robert Baker and pianist Molly Orlando sounding at ease, while Scriptorium (2021), written for the Byrne:Kozar Duo is a nice bonus for this fan of It Floats Away From You (see above). The final piece, Ars Poetica (2021), finds Boyce pushing in new directions, collaborating with Gullah-Geechee poet Marlanda Dekine, whose stolid recitations create a powerful counterpoint to the playing of Counter)Induction, the violin/guitar/cello trio of Nurit Pacht, Daniel Lippel, and Caleb van der Swaagh.

— Jeremy Shatan, 1.04.2024

For the American composer Douglas Boyce, writing music is an act of philosophising. Each of the recent vocalchamber 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.

Boyce, born in 1970 and a humanist committed to probing the significance of creating music in the present vis-à-vis its historical burden, shows a particular kinship to the polyphonic inquisitiveness of the poet Jorie Graham. His setting of ‘A Feather for Voltaire’ (from Graham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Dream of the Unified Field) not only launches the album but is the source of its title (the poem begins: ‘The bird is an alphabet’). Graham’s splendid text itself transmogrifies ‘nature poetry’ into (at times unsettling) philosophic rumination about the nature of art.

Boyce positions ‘Feather’ as the first in his triptych A Book of Songs for piano and tenor, complemented by settings of fellow American poets BJ Ward (‘The Apple Orchard in October’) and Wallace Stevens (the remarkable ‘Cy est pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les unze mille vierges’ from Stevens’s debut collection, Harmonium). Even here, in the most conventionally scored cycle on the album, Boyce recalibrates assumptions about the art song. Pianist Molly Orlando’s exchanges with the tenor – Robert Baker’s timbre uncannily evoking echoes of Peter Pears – drift unpredictably between neoExpressionist word-painting and alluring abstractions.

The four-part cycle Scriptorium from 2021 sets rigorous but gorgeously wrought texts by the Tennessee poet Melissa Range as duets for soprano and trumpet (Corrine Byrne and Andy Kozar). Boyce draws on his longstanding interest in medieval and early music, exploiting the alienness of rhythmic and contrapuntal practice and his peculiar coupling of timbres to striking, avant-garde effect.

A third, bracingly vernacular exploration of song and chamber music emerges in the collaborative Ars Poetica, the most recent work on the album, which Boyce characterises as ‘an intersection of worlds … thinking on what it is to live, to love, even to merely be in the Zerrissenheit of this world’. The poetry by Marlanda Dekine (a member of South Carolina’s Gullah Geechee community) addresses American culture and the struggle for identity from both intimate and epic perspectives. Dekine delivers a riveting spoken-word performance every bit as virtuosic as the commentary and instrumental interludes played by the trio of violin, cello and guitar – members of the artist collective counter)induction, which Boyce co-founded in 1998. Shades of Copland in his populist mode enter surprisingly but unironically, in the final section, bringing Boyce’s polyglot stylistic allusions to a conciliatory, gentle ending.

— Thomas May, 1.17.2024

The Bird is an Alphabet is the recent release from New Focus Recordings of three song cycles composed by Douglas Boyce on texts by Jorie Graham, BJ Ward, Wallace Stevens, Melissa Range and Marlanda Dekine. The works are performed by Robert Baker, Molly Orlando, the Byrne:Kozar:Duo and counter)induction with Marlanda Dekine. The hour-long album is available in digital format and includes an e-booklet with notes on the pieces and an introductory essay on the theme of the album, namely the bird as a symbol of both encoded meaning and experiential transcendence. Reinforcing this metaphor is the fact that the various sections of the liner notes are headed by short inscriptions in a cryptic alphabetic script. Upon applying my own decipherment efforts, however, these appear to simply be short excerpts of poetic lines and composition titles from the album project transcribed into an invented UK-English-based phonetic alphabet.

The album opens with A Book of Songs on texts by Graham, Ward and Stevens - in three movements - for tenor voice and piano, here interpreted by Baker and Orlando. The opening movement, 'A Feather For Voltaire', features a slow and steady tenor voice line underscored by a versatile piano texture that alternates among fast ostinati in the mid-high range of the instrument, abrupt declamatory gestures in the bass and silent pauses. Harmonically, the music moves between freely atonal and diatonic sonorities with an apparent focus on the dominant seventh chord. Altogether, the movement seems to symbolically suggest a prolonged state of tension between restrained readiness to take flight and flight itself.

Movement two, 'The Apple Orchard in October', unfolds at a slower pace than the first and is characterized by the piano's focus on the lower-mid register, juxtaposing legato bass notes and arpeggiated staccato triads in a harmonic framework that suggests bitonality, lending the text setting a kind of uneasy resonance. Meanwhile, the vocal line reinforces this same aesthetic with dramatic effect through the incorporation of repeated notes and glissandi. Movement three, 'Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, Et Les Unze Mille Vierges', introduces a new texture - repeated block chords in the piano - which propels the music forward with more momentum and allows the listener to hear more of a simultaneity of voice and piano than is heard in the other movements. In addition, the use of hand-muting, strumming and plucking on the piano strings lends an array of timbral surprises throughout the movement that enhance the text setting and help create a sense of sonic development for the song cycle as a whole.

This is followed by the next song cycle, Scriptorium, a setting of texts by Range in four movements for soprano and trumpet, here performed by the Byrne:Kozar:Duo. The first movement, 'Tyrian Purple', is moderately slow and quiet, showcasing the voice and trumpet in imitative polyphony through a fluid harmonic field characterized by emphasis on tritones and octaves. Here, occasional instances of the growl effect in the trumpet are used to add further harmonic color and, thus, suggest a homophonic dimension amid an otherwise polyphonic soundscape.

The second movement, 'Orpiment', continues the rhythmic momentum of the first movement in a slightly faster tempo, louder dynamic and more diatonic harmonic palette. In addition, the use of higher registers in the trumpet - with and without a mute - brightens the timbral experience of the music. In movement three, 'Lampblack', the sound world established in the first two movements is rhythmically expanded through the audible use of polymeter. This is further enhanced by the juxtaposition of high registers in the slow-moving voice with low registers in the fast-moving muted trumpet. In the fourth and final movement, 'Verdigris', the music returns to a midrange tempo for voice and trumpet alike, as both reach the highest registers of their respective ranges. Here, repeated motives emerge in both voice and trumpet reminiscent of bird calls, forming a kind of imitative polyphony that is distinct from - while still strangely reminiscent of - the imitations heard in the opening movement.

The album concludes with Ars Poetica, a song cycle on poems of Dekine in nine movements, as interpreted by the guitar-violin-cello trio counter)induction with spoken-word recitation by the poet. More specifically, the song cycle consists of five movements of sung texts interspersed with four instrumental intermezzi. In the first movement, 'Wilderness', all three instruments move continuously in a medium tempo with a fluid harmonic palette blending elements of free atonality with tritone-focused harmonic centrism. The spoken word unfolds at a pace that seems to overlap with the tempo of the instruments, though in a manner rather more organic and spacious than metronomic. This is followed by the brief 'Intermezzo 1', which preserves the metrical flow of the preceding movement with a series of slightly more frenzied gestures.

In movement three, 'Returning', the instrumental tempo slows considerably, as does the texture. Here, the sonic palette is mostly monophonic and rhythmically free, though instrumental gestures seem to occasionally punctuate the speaker's syllables, suggesting more of a strict rhythmic composition in the voice. The brief 'Intermezzo 2' follows, breaking up the texture with some densely woven atonal counterpoint at a semi-brisk tempo. In this movement, the instruments play in their higher registers, lending a sonic brightness which provides a timbral contrast to the other movements as well. Next is the brief and fierce fifth movement, 'Out There', which juxtaposes percussive dissonances with stark open-strings fifths. In addition, Boyce uses significant silent pauses in the accompaniment to help give the reader a great deal of space, which proves crucial in helping the listener absorb the poem's words portraying racial injustice and police brutality.

This is followed in stark contrast by the very slow and tranquil 'Intermezzo 3', which arguably feels like a brief wordless elegy in light of the preceding movement. For movement seven, 'Reclamation', the mid-tempo strings take on yet another timbral shift, here employing pizzicato for the first time in the song cycle. This pizzicato continues in 'Intermezzo 4', uniting with previously heard textures - such as slow legato strings and lyrical melodic passages - to suggest an impending summary of the cycle as a sonic experience. The ninth and final movement, 'Risk', sees the three instruments uniting in lush, sonorous homophonic textures in accompaniment to the spoken word, suggesting a kind of Baroque-style operatic lament to end the song cycle.

From the album's title and symbolic presentation to Boyce's composition of the music itself, The Bird is an Alphabet is a deceptively complex release that invites listeners to take an active role in discovering the layers of meaning hidden throughout its depths of sound and its presentation of language and symbolism. Unusually for a vocal album, the texts themselves are not present in the liner notes; the reader is instead redirected to find these on the label's website. Nonetheless, I hardly consider this a design flaw in light of everything else described here. On the contrary, it seems to me rather 'on theme', especially in light of the linguistic puzzle (the literal cryptic alphabet) that heads the sections of the liner notes. It all contributes to the experience of a final product wherein, phenomenologically, nearly every perceptible aspect of the album is a challenge of decoding laid out for the listener - one with rewards of insight awaiting those who fully commit to the journey. In conclusion, this is an album highly recommended for those with an interest in the forefront of experimental symbolism in contemporary song cycles, an unusual vision bravely conceived and sensitively executed by all involved.

— John Dante Prevedini, 1.24.2024

It’s a happy event to encounter a collection of American art songs as skillfully written and beautifully performed as this one, titled The Bird Is an Alphabet. Composer Douglas Boyce has developed a thoughtful and deeply considered aesthetic, as described in the booklet note, which informs us that he “writes chamber music that draws on Medieval and Renaissance traditions and modernist aesthetics, building rich rhythmic structures that shift between order, fragmentation, elegance, and ferocity.” In this description there’s a clue about the current state of American art songs, which isn’t encouraging.

Too much is thought, too little is felt. Such a criticism might seem unfair, but it points to the scarcity of audience appeal in this genre. Somehow, regrettably, the American art song has dwindled, and it takes a famous name like Elliott Carter or John Harbison to attract audiences outside a limited music-department setting. The last such recital I attended was of Carter’s settings of Elizabeth Bishop, and it reminded me of how moving even Carter’s arcane musical language can be for the general listener.

For their part, today’s composers are just as sensitive to poetry as in the past, and they don’t tend to set abstruse contemporary texts. Boyce’s chosen texts are accessible. The last song, Ars Poetica, is set for a speaker, the poet Marlanda Dekine, who is quite good at reciting her own verse. (Combining music and speaker has a historical precedent in the Romantic-era melodrama, like Richard Strauss’s Enoch Arden. The form used to be as popular as it is now forgotten.)

It is still true that words make a contemporary idiom easier. Boyce’s atonal musical language is challenging, but it sometimes suggests a tonal center and fragmentary melody. The most traditional format here belongs to the three-movement A Book of Songs, scored for tenor and piano. The piano part performs the traditional role of setting the mood, but Boyce’s piano writing is an equal partner to the singer and often goes in its own direction. Because the vocal line isn’t melodic, I got more from the piano, in fact, but credit is due to lyric tenor Robert Baker, who is quite musical and enunciates English clearly enough that following with the text isn’t always necessary.

More innovative is Scriptorium, four songs set for soprano and trumpet. The patent on that unique combination is held by the Byrne:Kozar:Duo, whose members, soprano Corinne Byrne and trumpeter Andrew Kozar, are deservedly acclaimed. Byrne delivers the words with perfect clarity, a considerable achievement in contemporary vocal works, and Boyce adroitly exploits the possibilities in the trumpet part. There’s much to appreciate if you can adapt your ear to the abstract vocal line.

The richest instrumentation in the collection is offered by Ars Poetica, where the speaker is joined by a mellow chamber ensemble of violin, cello, and guitar. (The performers are drawn from a larger group, counter)induction, of which Boyce is a composer-in-residence.) In form, Ars Poetica is a single poem in five parts alternating with four instrumental Intermezzos. The subject is endangered ethnic identity, because Marlanda Dekine belongs to the Gullah Geechee, the surviving descendants of slaves from West and Central Africa who were brought to the lower Atlantic states to work on plantations. They are the last speakers of a Creole language that combines English with some 30 African languages, although Dekine’s poem is in English.

Ars Poetica is powerful in every aspect: Boyce’s inventive music, Dekine’s tangled cultural experience, and her strong delivery. But every piece here is admirably crafted and performed. It must seem strange that I have made so little mention of the individual poets, but they are unknown to me except for Wallace Stevens, who is represented in A Book of Songs by “Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges,” which despite its inscrutable title is about a woman presenting flowers to God and hoping He notices (He does).

That poem is a century old, and I fear that the poems Boyce has set won’t be appreciated for nearly that long, or even half. Poetry has become a tiny cultural sideline pursued by a coterie of writers talking to each other and to themselves. I can’t say I was moved by any of these verses, several of which seem little different from prose. For me, the main attraction is Boyce’s music in and of itself.

— Huntley Dent, 6.05.2024

The always impressive composer Douglas Boyce enlists some excellent help for these 3 pieces with voice that showcase his recent chamber works with particularly strong attention to detail.

A Book Of Songs starts the listen with 3 chapters, where Molly Orlando’s swirling keys are met with Robert Baker’s glowing tenor that’s expressive and suits the highly animated piano playing that can rumble lowly, too.

Scriptorium occupies the middle spot, and features the Byrne:Kozar:Duo, as Corinne Byrne’s soprano soars high amid Andrew Kozar’s well timed trumpet bouts for soulful, intimate moments of beauty.

The last 9 tracks belong to Ars Poetica, and they host Marlanda Dekine’s voice, Nurit Pacht’s violin, Daniel Lippel’s guitar and Caleb van der Swaggh’s cello for the unique, rich chamber ideas that are unpredictable and rhythmically aware.

A poetic body of work that embraces distinct harmonics, theatrical nods and atypical grooves, Boyce never approaches songwriting with a conventional spirit, and that theme is continued here.

— Tom Haugen, 9.05.2024