Songs from the Plays

for High Voice and Piano Approximate Duration: 30' PROGRAM NOTES In Songs From the Plays, New York poet Kenneth Koch creates charming, witty, and moving songs excerpted from imaginary plays. It is as if we have found the most exquisite cornice of a vanished cathedral, and its beautiful craftsmanship soon makes us forget from where it came. This cycle uses seven of Koch’s twenty-seven poems, arranging them around three important aspects of life as presented in the final song: love, friendship, and art. Though this song comes last, fragments of it appear between some of the songs to guide us through their thematic groupings. “Bring Back the Beds” is a fanfare with a love song, in which the poet reminisces about those wonderful little details cherished by lovers — beds, linen, flowers, hotels. The final line confirms the touch of bittersweet nostalgia hanging over the poem, suggested by the searching chord progressions. In “They Say Prince Hamlet’s Found a Southern Island” — a lopsided ba