For the American composer Douglas Boyce, writing music is an act of philosophising. Each of the recent vocal-chamber works gathered on this album revolves around a distinctive stylistic orientation and scoring. The effect is not merely an array of varying sound environments but an interrogation of the nature of language – musical and verbal, and the potential interlockings between these conduits of meaning – along with its limits and liberations.

Boyce, born in 1970 and a humanist committed to probing the significance of creating music in the present vis-à-vis its historical burden, shows a particular kinship to the polyphonic inquisitiveness of the poet Jorie Graham. His setting of ‘A Feather for Voltaire’ (from Graham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Dream of the Unified Field) not only launches the album but is the source of its title (the poem begins: ‘The bird is an alphabet’). Graham’s splendid text itself transmogrifies ‘nature poetry’ into (at times unsettling) philosophic rumination about the nature of art.

Boyce positions ‘Feather’ as the first in his triptych A Book of Songs for piano and tenor, complemented by settings of fellow American poets BJ Ward (‘The Apple Orchard in October’) and Wallace Stevens (the remarkable ‘Cy est pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les unze mille vierges’ from Stevens’s debut collection, Harmonium). Even here, in the most conventionally scored cycle on the album, Boyce recalibrates assumptions about the art song. Pianist Molly Orlando’s exchanges with the tenor – Robert Baker’s timbre uncannily evoking echoes of Peter Pears – drift unpredictably between neo-Expressionist word-painting and alluring abstractions.

The four-part cycle Scriptorium from 2021 sets rigorous but gorgeously wrought texts by the Tennessee poet Melissa Range as duets for soprano and trumpet (Corrine Byrne and Andy Kozar). Boyce draws on his longstanding interest in medieval and early music, exploiting the alienness of rhythmic and contrapuntal practice and his peculiar coupling of timbres to striking, avant-garde effect.

A third, bracingly vernacular exploration of song and chamber music emerges in the collaborative Ars poetica, the most recent work on the album, which Boyce characterises as ‘an intersection of worlds … thinking on what it is to live, to love, even to merely be in the Zerrissenheit of this world’. The poetry by Marlanda Dekine (a member of South Carolina’s Gullah Geechee community) addresses American culture and the struggle for identity from both intimate and epic perspectives. Dekine delivers a riveting spoken-word performance every bit as virtuosic as the commentary and instrumental interludes played by the trio of violin, cello and guitar – members of the artist collective counter)induction, which Boyce co-founded in 1998. Shades of Copland in his populist mode enter, surprisingly but unironically, in the final section, bringing Boyce’s polyglot stylistic allusions to a conciliatory, gentle ending.