Elliott Carter has written about his song cycle Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975): "When I agreed to write a cycle of songs for the ensemble Speculum Musicae I decided, first, that it should be for soprano and chamber orchestra. The poems of Elizabeth Bishop impressed me because they have a clear verbal coherence as well as an imaginative use of syllabic sounds that suggest the singing voice. I was very much in sympathy with their point of view, for there is almost always a secondary layer of meaning, sometimes ironic, sometimes passionate, that gives a special ambiance, often contradictory, to what the words say. The order of the songs is entirely mine, alternating as they do between considerations about nature, love and isolation. A Mirror on Which to Dwell, a line from the poem Insomnia is the title I chose partly because it seemed to characterize the general world of the poems, partly because I wanted the music to be a mirror of the words and partly because Speculum Musicae commissioned the work in honor of the U.S. Bicentennial. Watch a performance of Anaphora, the first song in Elliott Carter's Mirror on Which to Dwell, with soprano Jo Ellen Miller and the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, Jeffrey Means conducting . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Mario Verandi is an Argentinean born composer, sound and media artist. He primarily works with new technologies as an aid to exploring and expanding the boundaries of sound, space, perception and meaning. A distinct characteristic of his work has been the exploration of the poetic and evocative potential of concrete and environmental sounds and their incorporation in sound compositions, audiovisual installations, live performances and radio art pieces. His works have received prizes and awards in the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition (France), Musica Nova Competition (Prague), CIEJ Electronic Music Awards (Barcelona), Prix Ars Electronica (Linz), Stockholm Electronic Art Awards (Sweden), SGAE Electroacoustic Music Competition (Spain) and the European Bell Days Composition Prize (ZKM, Karlsruhe). He has a long-standing interest in interdisciplinary projects and as a result has created music and sound designs for art installations, dance, theatre, films and the radio. Verandi has collaborated among others with the American visual artist Catherine Ferguson, German choreographer Helge Musial, Polish theater director Grazyna Kania, German visual artist Corinna Rosteck, Berlin-based visual artitst Lillevan, Russian visual artists Igor and Svetlana Kopystianski, and German film-maker Harun Farocki. Listen to Mario Verandi's Klangbuch der imaginaeren Wesen (2007) . . . it's our SOUND ART for the week.

Composer Kaija Saariaho writes: "Grammaire des Rêves/Grammar of Dreams (1988-89) was born from my curiosity about the relationship between human voice and instruments, a subject which I had put aside for many years. As the title of the piece indicates, another source of interest was the structural life of dreams. Different ideas concerning the research of dreams (for example, how our moving body affects our dreams, changing their directions or interrupting them; in this piece the harp is imagined as a collection of restless limbs, which by their movements direct the musical flow), are drawn to the background during the compositional work, or are transformed into purely musical form. Another interest was to search for a fusion in this rather heterogeneous ensemble. For this reason the musical texture is maybe more simple than in some other of my recent pieces, and the more radical textural changes have been replaced by vibratos, trills, glissandi, dynamic evolutions and other gestures, used here as imaginary matrices, through which the instrumental parts are ‘filtered’. The major part of the text is a collage from the texts of Paul Eluard. Some longer fragments have been used from his poem Premierèment. Listen to Kaija Saariaho's Grammaire des rêves/Grammar of Dreams . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS for the week.