My Own Country

"Englishness is difficult to define in musical terms. Word-setting is certainly one way in which a composer may publish his birth certificate: his response to a specific turn of speech, to the rhythm of his own language, may result in an idiosyncratic musical equivalent that could not have derived from another tongue." So wrote the critic Donald Mitchell, and the collection of songs on this disc supports his assertion: any "Englishness" exhibited by these songs does not derive so much from a musical style unique to this country, as from each composer's response to the text.