Part Songs
Lawrence Kramer
About this work:
The title "Part Songs" refers to the genre of the work's vocal miniatures, i.e., mainly
homophonic songs for four voices a capella, and also to the fact that none of these
songs is quite complete, each being a setting of a fragmentary or fragment-like text
that records only a fleeting moment or the moment's fleeting. This uneasy alliance
of lyric recollection and its elusivenes, reflecting but also resisting nostalgia for an
unavailable wholeness, finds its echo in the harmony, which mixes chord types and
sonorities in way that are sometimes familiar and sometimes strange. The final song, echoing the first, frames the cycle with a paradox: music that emerges and persists in the act of recalling the vanishing of another music.
Year composed: 2015
Duration: 13:00:20
Ensemble type: Chorus, with or without Solo Voices:Chorus, Unaccompanied
Instrumentation: