Songs of Enchantment, for female voice and piano: Two Settings of Clark Ashton Smith

The originality of this musical work rests in bringing together techniques from Italian bel canto in the setting of vowels (c. Bellini, Puccini, Leoncavallo), phonetic experiments (c. Stockhausen, Jackson), spectral theory (c. Grisey, Murail, Saariaho, Lindberg), modal practices taken from jazz (c. Davis, Evans, Hancock, Coltrane) and common-tone harmonic theory (c. Kopp). The voice and piano combine to create a singular resonance in sympathy with the words. Employing an acoustic piano as a resonating chamber for the voice is a relatively common approach (c. Crumb), but a reciprocal relationship in which the voice also boosts the resonance of the piano is of significance here. The approach is informed by Reeves’s two-decade long research into piano resonance and his more recent research into the voice. These come together here for the first time.

With permission from the author’s estate, this is the second work to set the words of Clark Ashton Smith.