“Two Poems of Stephen Crane (2025) is a set of art songs based on poems (or “lines,” as he called them) by the American writer Stephen Crane (1871–1900). In “A man said to the universe” from War is Kind (1899), Crane paints a humorous portrait of humankind as insignificant in the seemingly limitless expanse of the universe. The author takes a more serious tone in “The ocean said to me once” from The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895), which centers on the universality of loss and grief. I have paired these two poems despite their contrasting contents because both have in common a conversation between a person and something incomprehensibly vast: the universe and the ocean, respectively. In addition, in both texts a narrator relays the words of the other characters through quotations; in this song cycle, the narrator’s voice is spoken by the mezzo-soprano, while the quotations are sung.”