To judge from this injudiciously attentuated cycle on the poems of Emily Dickinson, Getty still has a great deal to learn about the art and craft that mean so much to him. He employs an idiom only a trifle less spare and simple than the New England hymnals of Dickinson's time....

In far, far too many of the songs, he falls back on a sort of punctuated recitative style, instead of devising interesting musical ideas and then organizing them into a true aesthetic entity...Getty does have an apt feeling for the poetry, and his sense of prosody, a few lapses excepted, stands him in good stead.