According to her friends' reports, Emily Dickinson used to sit at her family's piano late at night improvising "weird and beautiful melodies." Those melodies have vanished, but in his carefully elaborated cycle "The White Election" (Delos D/CD 3057, with booklet), composer Gordon Getty has set 31 of her poems (one of them twice as beginning and end) as he thinks she might have done "if her music had found a balance between tradition and iconoclasm, something like that in her poems." Like the poems, the music has a deceptive air of simplicity and the power to wound -- deeply, suddenly, unexpectedly. The cycle, arranged in roughly chronological order, tells a story (conjectural in some details) about the unfulfilled love that led the poet to become a recluse in her late twenties.

Setting Dickinson to music has become a sort of cottage industry among American composers, but this thoughtful, quirky cycle stands out in sharp relief from similar efforts. The performance by soprano Kaaren Erickson and pianist Armen Guzelimian is excellent and the composer's detailed program notes are worth careful reading.