Song Without Words

Augusta Read Thomas’s Song Without Words is chamber music shared between equal partners, oboe and piano, who work together to create a beautiful performance of a lyrical, elegant, and poignant composition that is immediate while, at the same time, holding deep, rich sonic meanings. The music’s delicate use of sonic alliteration, assonance, simile, slant rhymes, and other poetic devices reveals a composer with a poetic sensibility who composes entirely “heard” music. The contrapuntal back and forth between the lyrical oboe line and the somewhat jazzy piano harmonies develops and increases, always allied to an interwoven flow, timbre, texture, and resonance. The duo braid together to create an artwork that captures and expresses the aura of the E.E. Cummings poem, “I Have Found What You Are Like” — without a single word of text ever being sung (or spoken).

Grammy-winning oboist Alex Klein, says he first performed the work on a July 6, 2021, Rush Hour Concerts recital in Chicago. “The music of Augusta Read Thomas has always inspired me by its space,” Klein says. “There is a fluidity and grandeur within it, an entire universe of sound in a small package. I have noticed this in her chamber works as well as her orchestral writing. The result is an ethereal, calm landscape that is a welcome challenge to the instrumentalists, the musicians and the thinkers on stage.”