'The Bird is an Alphabet' Album Release

Released on December 8th, Douglas Boyce's album The Bird is an Alphabet showcases the composer's recent chamber works featuring voice. Performers include poet Marlanda Dekine, the ensemble counter)induction, Byrne:Kozar:Duo, tenor Robert Baker, and pianist Molly Orlando. Boyce sets texts by Dekine, Melissa Range, Wallace Stevens, Jorie Graham, and BJ Ward, approaching each song as a dramatic project searching for synthesis between music and meaning to animate the words. As a musical philosopher, Boyce draws on early music, literature, and aesthetic thought not just as influences but as core aspects of his conviction that music provides a forum for enlightened discourse. Working with text allows him to merge semantic and abstract expression. The album ranges from conventional song settings in A Book of Songs to exploring unusual instrumentation with Byrne:Kozar:Duo and incorporating spoken word in Ars Poetica. Throughout the collection, Boyce investigates how text shapes musical sound and vice versa, using the interplay of music and language for expressive and intellectual ends, considering the vastness of historicality and the Zerrissenheit of the present.