ASKED TO DEFINE the art-song genre, Rena Sharon pauses for a moment, then suggests it’s one way of translating word and image into sound.

“Do you know the song ‘Sure on This Shining Night’ by Samuel Barber?” she asks, in a phone interview from her Vancouver home. “It’s based on a wonderful, wonderful poem by James Agee about standing outside on a starry night and looking up and feeling that you’re connected to the cosmos, and that the cosmos cares about you. In the middle of the song it says, ‘All is healed, all is health./High summer holds the earth./Hearts all whole.’ And with the notes that Barber chose to set those words, when a great singer is singing them and there are beautiful chords in the piano part, it actually becomes an invocation.

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