This work consists of a triptych on three poems from poet Nicholas Wolf’s published anthology of the same name. The first movement, Chartres, takes up the idea that great works are made of countless small decisions to act, each built on the last. The music is built the same way: increasingly complex material grows from the single E-minor “wheat seed” theme of the poem’s opening line. An unexpected hemiola heralds the “armies” of ripened grain, then returns as the choir sings of Chartres cathedral, raised one stone at a time. A settled, simple G-major cadence tempers the poem’s closing admonition. The first audio sample begins at measure 32. Here is Wolf’s complete text: © Nicholas Wolf, all rights reserved. The second movement, Two Questions, sets the volume’s shortest poem as an agonizingly slow but inexorably advancing fugue in E minor. The subject, ponderous in its searching, is introduced by the basses and taken up in turn by all four voices. Just at the point of expected resolution, the basses reemerge from the texture with the second question, now in C-sharp minor and related keys, and the harmonic fumbling restarts with fresh but still-frustrated impetus. Stretti intensify the pleading quality of this unresolved search, and a staggering, often dissonant path to the final E-minor cadence offers no easy answers. Here is Wolf’s complete text: © Nicholas Wolf, all rights reserved. The third movement, Loss, opens with an ordinary suburban scene: goldfinches at a feeder, sketched by sopranos and altos in a peppy D-major theme. But the “yellow mites dart away” as the protagonist approaches, and he reads their flight as personal rejection — leaving the listener to wonder at the source of his fragile self-worth. Dark, suspensively dissonant chords render the “brooding ugly creature” he takes himself to be, until, wearying of his self-pity, he retreats to the comfort of an “inviting fire,” which the choir renders warmly in the home key. The second audio sample begins at measure 1. Here is Wolf’s complete text: © Nicholas Wolf, all rights reserved. Lost and Found is an ambitious, large-scale work for an a cappella SATB choir, rewarding singers with real musical architecture across its three panels.