Fire, Fire, Quench Desire

Jack Beeson writes: "This selection of 26 songs (and two arias from operas) comprises about a third of my works for solo voice and piano and most of those written for soprano. The poetry dates from the end of the 16th century to the late 20th century and encompasses a wide variety of styles and subject matter. In order to reflect this variety, the music ranges widely in style, from the simplicities of the Blake settings to the 12-tone serialism of Fire, Fire, Quench Desire. Hughes's black-magic Death by Owl-Eyes invokes a traversal of musical idioms from early Renaissance open fifths to some of the habits of the 1960s. The song is dedicated to Otto Luening, another 20th century time-traveler. It is often forgotten that a musical setting is an arrangement of a poem: it is the composer's interpretation of the words, made audible by means of his or her choice of pitch, tessitura, accentuation, and phrasing in the vocal line, and choice of style, mood, and implied action in the accompaniment."