Voices From The Morning Of The Earth: A Cycle of American Songs from North and South, East and West (2008) is the sixth of seven American Songbooks that occupied George Crumb for most of the millennium’s opening decade. This recording (Volume 17 of Bridge’s Crumb Edition) completes Bridge’s cycle of Crumb’s American Songbooks.

The seven songbooks are approximately five hours in length, and constitute George Crumb’s magnum opus. Also on this CD is Crumb’s Idyll for the Misbegotten. The composer writes that “flute and drum are to me those instruments which most powerfully evoke the voice of nature. I have suggested that ideally (even if impractically) my Idyll should be heard from afar, over a lake, on a moonlit evening in August”.

The Sleeper, with words by Edgar Allan Poe, transforms Poe’s lugubrious meditation on a dead beloved (“Soft may the worms about her creep!”) into a haunting ode to a woman slumbering beneath the “mystic moon”.

Contents:
- Voices from the Morning of the Earth
A Cycle of American Songs from North and South, East and West (2008) (American Songbook VI)
Ann Crumb (soprano), Randall Scarlata (baritone)
Orchestra 2001 / James Freeman

- An Idyll for the Misbegotten
Rachel Rudich (flute)
David Colson (percussion), Paul Herrick (percussion), A J Matthews (percussion)

- The Sleeper
Ann Crumb (soprano), Marcantonio Barone (piano)