Britain, long revered for its choral music and partsongs, had largely neglected art songs since the Elizabethan era. The middle of the nineteenth century witnessed efforts to revive the genre, particularly in the works of Sir C. Hubert Parry and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. The following generation, including the Scottish composer Hamish MacCunn (1868–1916), built on the foundations laid by Parry and Stanford and served as the bridge to the vocal music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir Edward Elgar, Ivor Gurney, John Ireland, and ultimately Benjamin Britten. Though best known for his Scottish-influenced compositions, MacCunn composed over 100 songs that, free from national constraints, are some of the most refined and sophisticated examples of his music. Almost no modern editions of MacCunn’s song exist, though many were published during the composer’s lifetime. The current two-part edition presents the composer’s 102 extant songs. Part 1 contains 53 individual songs; Part 2 presents the songs that were first published as small collections.

Part ancient Greek chorus, part Southern Baptist revival, Songs for Two Voices is an explosive showcase for Bruce Smith's jazz-like variations on sonnets and couplets, offering twenty-five duets: poems of call and response, song and countersong. In poems that groove and break, shimmy and dance, Smith filters his Miles Davis-like riffs through a post-World War II American sensibility to deliver verse without platitudes. As Smith's speakers wander through the detritus of American materialism-encountering jazz, football, drag, class war, Reaganomics, and Vietnam-the poems dramatize the contradictions and peculiarities of growing up male in Cold War America, both sensing promise and suffering disillusion. Each poem here speaks in two voices: one that attacks and one that cowers, one voice that leads while the other follows. But Smith's subjects are unencumbered by form, and their voices blossom in duet: the idealized lover is also a betrayer, the man is also a girl. These binaries of statement and contradiction give birth to a third voice in the unrealized possibilities of the two. A mesmerizing follow-up to 2000's The Other Lover, Smith's Songs for Two Voices is carnal yet fiercely intellectual, laid out with the self-confidence of a poet who can invoke Mozart and Coltrane, Anna Akhmatova and John Wayne, Teddy Roosevelt and Augustine in the same incendiary breath.