About this Work

Songs of Loss is a set of three pieces for solo piano, each of which is an actual setting of text for piano alone.  In truth, two of the pieces were based on older songs I had written several years before.  The first and last songs are each settings of poems by Stephen Crane from his cycle “Intrigue.”  Since they’re related, they share similar motives attached to words which recur in each poem.  The second piece is a setting of Paul Celan’s “Coagula,” a short poem in which he tells of two women with the same name who died under violent circumstances.