Four Songs In Miniature

To mark the 100th birthday of Ursula Mamlok (1923 – 2016), Boosey & Hawkes Bote & Bock, in collaboration with the Dwight and Ursula Mamlok Foundation, is publishing a series of works from the composer's estate that were not published during her lifetime. This volume brings together four aphoristic songs from 1946 and 1950, which show Mamlok to be an early (and then lifelong) mistress of the small form and are all the more interesting because vocal music plays rather a minor role in the composer's oeuvre. Here she responds to the poetry and the way of thinking of her adopted homeland of only a few years, with English texts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The themes and attitudes are as varied as their authors, from the idyll of nature to the snapshot of a party to the grotesque nursery rhyme, each of which is put into music by Mamlok just as sparingly as fittingly.