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Poetry and music accomplish together what neither can accomplish alone. For the majority of the works on this album, John Wykoff collaborated with one of the best choral lyricists of our time. In writing the words for many of the works, Charles Anthony Silvestri was finely sensitive to the ways in which music transforms a text and is transformed in return. His lyrics are imaginative and beautiful, yet he leaves room for music to interpret the text and divert its meaning…Music can account for many dimensions. From the comfort, consolation, protection, sacredness in Out of This Darkness, it also has the power to combine these with their opposite: threat, danger, and disquietude. Only the combination of words and music makes all these nuances possible. While lyrics typically precede music, sometimes it is the other way around, as with the Inventions for Choir (and Piano), where Wykoff considered what it would mean to take the spirit and purpose of Bach’s famous keyboard inventions, but not the style, and write a set for singers in a contemporary choral idiom. And then there is Five American Songs, which began not with words or music separately, but with old songs whose words and music were already wed. Wykoff set out not to alter or change each song, but to lovingly frame it (to “curate it,” as he heard Alice Parker say once). Any undue intrusion of the composer would distract from these charming songs, not enhance them. Songs do not live on paper. They come alive only when sung and played. The Missouri State Chorale, Parker Payne, and Cameron LaBarr bring these works to life. Music is something humans do together. And singing together is something that usually makes us more human.