Poetry is the writer's world of language which conveys to us images, moods, archetypes, and essential situations of existence in a concentrated form. The lyric metaphor inspires the musician, gives him a creative impulse, provides him with visions in sound. Conversely, the concreteness of the words is transcended by the immateriality of music into a spiritual and emotional world. The five works on this CD subsist from such a reciprocal interplay of music and literature. Although all the compositions of Norbert J. Schneider (who is internationally well-known for his music for numerous feature films) were written within a period of just seven years, they are surprisingly varied. The Hesse songs of 1983 are still in a style indebted to Webern and Messiaen while the "Trakl-Traume" [Trakl Dreams] of 1987 use polyperiodic procedures and processes of addition and subtraction, and "Gemeinsam einsam" [Alone Together] of 1990 is quite unabashedly filled with postmodern disjunctions.