Balch, Katherine: aeiou

for SSAA unaccompanied choir

This short dreamy choral work is a tapestry of subtle, ever shifting beauty. This piece is inspired by a passage from Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages. Katherine Balch further explains, “aeiou explores shifts in color produced by changes in vowel sounds that take place as the voices expand outward from a central point. Consonants should add a mild articulation to changing harmonies. These consonant articulations are nonsensical, but as more are added, they should evoke or imply an imaginary text.”