Chamber Cantata

for soprano, flute and harpsichord
composed 1983; duration 9 minutes
text in English by Piet Hein
world premiere Copenhagen (Denmark) 1984
Birgitte Lindhart – soprano; Lars Graugaard – flute; Ulla Kappel – harpsichord

The soprano sings fragments of a well-known gruk by the Danish inventor and philosopher Piet Hein. The words tell us to do all things with artlessness, yet the meaning is lost in the complete splitting up of the text. Formally, the piece is a set of variations on a sequence of 10 pitches.

Piet Hein’s gruk is this:

There is one art
No more, no less
To do all things
With artlessness

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