With album ‘Beautiful Small Things,’ Chicago nonprofit sets poetry by nonspeaking autistic youth to music

It’s a fool’s errand to sum up the profundity of “Beautiful Small Things” — a new album mostly recorded in downtown Chicago’s Guarneri Hall — but its title track comes close. Pillowed piano chords start softly, becoming more emphatic. Then, the technicolor voice of mezzo-soprano Megan Moore fills the room.

“I want to see the world not by the whole, but by the all too beautiful small things,” she sings.

“Beautiful Small Things” is just one of the album’s 18 stirring contributions to the art song genre: a poem set to music and usually, but not always, performed by a singer and pianist. The track, with music by Philadelphia-based composer Emily Cooley, bundles all the best things about art song in two-and-a-half short minutes: a brief, evocative poem with an impact that washes over the body, the music filling in what the text does not say. Or, perhaps, cannot express.