Kolb, B :: Songs Before An Adieu

Program Notes

1. In The Sentences the lyrical quality of the sound, comprising singing melodies and smooth harmonic progressions, soft rhythms and delicate instrumental colorings, has been achieved within a tightly structured framework. The image of November and its cold, its flat sunlight and the coming of winter, are all reflected in the distant and austerity of the setting.

2. Now I lay twosongs juxta/posed se parated & re:lated (imagined) lost? Con-nected dis-junco cumming(s)

3. Cantata is a melancholy poem in two parts on the related themes of loneliness and memory. The argument plays on a bitter irony: the speaker of dreams of being able to share his pain with another human mind, but the absence of any sharing mind is precisely the source of pain. The song s vocal part articulates this irony by means of its pattern of spoken and lyrical passages, while the a lot flute and guitar provide a pastel background of subtly shifting harmonic murmurs.

4. Gluttonous Smoke is a drama; a dialogue between the sung soul, portrayed by the soprano, and the intoned insistence of our collectiveness, our cauldron, spoken by the guitarist. Here it is the painful separation from our memory, into the smoke, the whirling of the flute in the fragile (and constant) goodbye of birth.

5. L Adieu reassures us. The barrenness and whispering of the previous songs is replaced by a sustained melodic and contrapuntal union, by the repeated harmonies, and by the promiseful, yet nostalgic repetitions of the line: Et souviens-toi queen je t attendes.