ASK OF ME WHAT THE BIRDS SANG
Garth Baxter, composer / Navona Records
Stream or Buy: Apple Music / Spotify / YouTube
Modern traditionalist composer Garth Baxter’s album Ask of Me What the Birds Sang presents a wide range of instrumental and vocal music, with each work connected in some way to song. When Lights Begin to Show, for example, includes a musical quotation from “Afternoon on a Hill,” the first song in Baxter’s Three Poems from Edna St. Vincent Millay. Other song references come from Baxter’s earlier works or draw on folk music.
An unabashedly lyrical composer, Baxter brings together classical traditions of form and clear melodic writing with a contemporary approach to harmony and other musical elements. The result is a recording that reflects his deep connection to song while revealing the breadth of his chamber, vocal, piano, wind, and choral writing.
“The world needs beauty,and there is plenty of it to be found in this collection of art songs by American composer Garth Baxter. Baxter seems to have carved out a happy if quiet career as a composer in an array of genres, with art song at the forefront. He bills himself as a modern traditionalist, and the music heard here bears out that description. His songs are suffused with lyric romanticism within a framework of familiar tonality, but plenty of modernistic touches in both his melodic and harmonic palettes keep everything fresh. Baxter knows how to shape lovely melodic lines and to cushion them within a warm harmonic framework.”
“The songs reveal a very intimate and poetic character....they are delicate, nocturnal works, with pleasing and graceful harmonies, that accompany and elegantly underline the poetic texts.”
“There are many lovely things on this recording of songs by Garth Baxter about loss and memory and of marrying words to music. Most are sad, and the composer’s idiom is simple, straightforward, old-fashioned romantic, but in each Baxter’s ear for matching the rhythm and sense of the verse quickly allows him to identify the central point of emotional interest at which his inspiration and the singer’s art intersect.”