When the Cascade Quartet was kind enough to approach me to appear in concert with them, the immediate consideration was to find some repertoire. There is a perhaps surprisingly small number of pieces for quartet and tenor, and it was clear early on that we were looking at finding songs to arrange. Any number of traditional classical art songs would have sufficed, but we were drawn pretty early on to something a bit off the beaten path, and hit on the notion of featuring a popular artist. Björk, one of the most eclectic and creative musicians of our time, was among the first names we considered, and while I looked into a variety of others, ended up being the last as well. 

So why these five songs? First, the practical part: I wanted to choose songs that would reasonably map onto string quartet.  Much of Björk's output embraces instruments and timbres about as far removed from acoustic strings as you can imagine, and while it can be an interesting challenge to to adapt from such a dissimilar source, I was in this case more drawn to songs where I could hear with some immediacy how an adaptation could work, even if not every note faithfully reproduces the source material. In the same vein, they also needed to be songs I'd feel comfortable singing. I have neither the ability nor desire to imitate Björk's unique vocal style, so they had to be songs which make sense with my more conventional classical vocal approach. 

As a result, this collection may not include Björk's most famous songs, or act as any kind of representative sample, but they do include some of the "prettiest" songs in her output. The set is framed by two songs from her Vespertine album, "Sun in My Mouth" and "Mother Heroic" (the latter technically a B-side for one of Vespertine's other tracks' single release). Björk describes her conception for the album as "modern chamber music," which may not clarify much for those of us who have heard hundreds of works that could be described similarly, but does indicate a self-consciously classical mindset. Like the vast majority of classical composers (and unlike the vast majority of pop artists), for these two songs she sets existing poetry for the lyrics: "Crepuscule" (for "Sun in My Mouth") and "Belgium" (for "Mother Heroic"), both by innovative American poet e.e. cummings. And also like most classical settings, Björk's treatment of the text shades the meaning in ways that may elude readers of the poems themselves. This is especially true for "Mother Heroic," which, by only including the final stanza, eliminates the 1916 poem's readily apparent commentary on World War I.

The middle three songs come from various eras in Björk's career. 1993's "Anchor Song" is among the first solo songs she ever wrote (after more than a decade in various bands), and its texture and form is, for her, very simple: three saxophone parts (played by the same person and layered on top of each other), interspersed with lines from two near-identical verses. 2004's "Pleasure Is All Mine," a reflection on her then-new motherhood and how strength grows from generosity, and is the most overtly "feminine" of the songs: It may have spoken to me because of my own recent parenthood, and I'm hoping that with of her famed iconoclasm and her willingness to put men's words in her own mouth - see e.e. cummings above - the gender-bending wouldn't bother her. "New World" was written as credits music for the 2000 film Dancer in the Dark, for which Björk wrote the score and played the main character. With its sweeping orchestral instrumentals and melancholy major-tinged-with-minor modality, it ranks among her most plainly sentimental tracks.

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   –Grant Harville