Jason Eckardt is one of the leading American composers of his generation. “Undersong” is a cycle of works that explores the voice of the oppressed in society, constructed around Laura Mullen’s text of the same name. Eckardt says: “The more I thought about the metaphorical implications of the title and its relationship to my music, the richer it became. The shards that comprise much of the music’s surface also came to represent the ’noise’ that often covers, distorts, or skews a simpler essence that lies below.”

A way [tracing] is a 6-minute cello solo, extremely excited in character, even hectic, introducing a dialectic that will continue throughout the cycle. It is performed by acclaimed cellist Fred Sherry.

16, the composer has explained, refers to the 16 words that should have been excised from George Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address: ’The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’ In the opening solo, and on into much that follows, the flautist projects consonantal sounds, either directly or into the instrument, as if struggling to enunciate words – words that are perhaps being obstructed, or else words that are not yet fully formed.

The Distance (This) opens onto a larger plane: the cycle’s finale plays for almost half an hour, expanding the performing group to the scale of a compact orchestra (solo woodwinds and strings, piano, and vibraphone briefly doubling glockenspiel), and brings forward the human voice-not muffled, as in “16”, but overt and lyrical, the voice of a soprano singing the words by Laura Mullen already implicit.