Hi! I’m Véronique, a rising senior in the Bienen School of Music, where I study Voice and Opera as my primary major and am also pursuing a second, self-designed major which explores the language and poetry of music. Welcome to my research blog!
Singers are uniquely able among musicians to directly communicate text to an audience. As such, I’m hopelessly interested in how language informs the music of a particular composer, age, or culture. This summer, I am lucky enough to be researching exactly that. In our two year music theory track at Northwestern, music majors spend a significant amount of time studying art song and song cycles of German composers (known as “lieder”) largely in relation to their texts by the famous German poets: Goethe, Mörike, Eichendorff, and so on. French chanson is approached the same way; we frequently examine it in relation to the texts of famous poets like Verlaine. In art song, a genre of classical music traditionally setting a poem to music for voice and piano, the words and the music perpetually inform one another.
Goethe and Verlaine are unique voices of their respective times and cultures. The composers and songs which set them are the same. But as a lover of contemporary music, I was disappointed to find, as I explored the music library and searched through the back alleys and uncharted territories of NuCat, that the few books which discuss “contemporary” American song are largely published in the first half of the 20th century. Art songs are being composed all the time; why is it so difficult to find information about the styles and performance practices of the contemporary American song? In thinking back to my theory classes, studying art songs as both poetry and music, I decided to select an accessible and avant-garde (and, of course, uniquely American) poet, e.e. cummings, and to use his texts to examine the ways in which American art song composers unite his melodic but visually avant-garde poems to classical music.
Can these compositions aid us in better understanding and performing the contemporary style of American art song? Over the course of 8 weeks, I’ll be delving into the works of one poet and approximately 10 composers in order to examine a sample of uniquely American works in an attempt to understand just that.