Why Sing Art Songs

RECENTLY, AFTER THE CONCLUSION of a master class, a young teacher approached me with a question that I suspect numerous other teachers (young and older) have grappled with. She wanted to know how to answer her young students who frequently ask, Why do I have to sing art songs? The underlying but unspoken premise behind this question is, of course, Why can't I sing opera arias right away? That's the really important repertoire.There are many reasons we sing art songs. First and foremost is that we learn from any vocal repertoire we sing, and singing songs gives us a unique chance to work with words as poetry. Singers are wordsmiths; words are our stock in trade. Art songs (or classical songs) were poems before a composer was inspired by their words and images to set them in a musical context as a song. When we sing art songs, we are singing poems. Not unlike the ancient bards, as storytellers, we share these poems with our listening audience.Singing all vocal repertoire-arias, art songs, oratorio solos, chamber works-demands that we pay attention to words and how they interact in their musical settings. To paraphrase author Ernest Hemingway, these details are a moveable feast; they work for preparing every piece of vocal music we sing, no matter the genre. One word by itself has only its own literal meaning, but when juxtaposed with other words, images are created. Trying to capture and understand the interaction of words with the musical setting is part of good performance preparation.This particular column is not meant to be a criticism or indictment against opera, a music genre that I truly love. But opera is a very different art form from song. As with all other vocal forms, opera has its own identity, structure, and performance practices. Preparing for an operatic performance (or indeed, any vocal performance form) takes no less thought on the singer's part than preparation for a song recital, but the details and nuances are quite different.Because art songs are a smaller vocal form than operatic arias, the textual images and interpretive requirements tend to be much more compressed than in arias. Including songs in our repertoire offers an opportunity to experience and work with these. Many art songs can be classified as having operatic qualities and some arias can be said to be song-like. However, good singing is good singing, and the musical and technical demands of any vocal piece must be carefully and scrupulously prepared. This refers not only to the text, but also the musical markings the composer has indicated in the score.Just as words combined with one another create poetry, so poems combined with music create an art form filled with broader nuance and detail that come from the combination of the pitches, rhythms, and cadences of words combined with analogous elements found in music. Encapsulated in a musical setting, words can take on different meanings, suggesting new and peripheral images and subtler meanings through their coupling with melody, rhythm, harmony, and a piano component. Ingredients found in poetry, when combined with the elements of music, present us with a vocal form that continually enriches us as performers, since it is capable, through our assimilation and study, of never being the same.What draws a composer to a particular poem? How does he/she translate feelings about the poem into a musical setting that embellishes the original text? This blueprint of what the composer has interpreted in his/ her musical setting is what the performer needs to discover. In his venerable classic, The Art Song, James Husst Hall writes: Composer and interpreter alike approach the song through the poem. They study the structure, the movement of the verse; the organization of its lines, rhyme, and stanzas. These are important, for the poem gives form to the music.1Author Donald Ivey in his fine book Song: Anatomy, Imagery, and Styles, comments on the fusion of word and tone: Assuming that the amalgam of poetry and music is meaningful, the listener is rarely aware of the elements, but only the results of true synthesis. …