repertoire and an overview of the history of art song in

various countries. Art Song: Linking Poetry and Music book

goes further than a broad overview of song literature. It
deals fundamentally with what the art song genre is.
In my teaching and in numerous conversations with
professional colleagues and university/college students
over the years, I have become aware that though we work
with song repertoire constantly, when performance time
rolls around, many times the groundwork of preparing the
entire song has been neglected. I have had young singers in
master classes self-consciously read the poem they are
about to sing or stumble over the poetic phrases with all
the elegance of reading a grocery list. Often they cannot
define lesser-known words found in the text. I doubt that
every student takes every song they sing and dismantles its
musical parts, exploring how the composer has re-created
the poem as an art song.
So this book became a collection of thoughts on how to
prepare an art song for performance—what its basic parts
are and how they merge to create the song itself, which
links a poem to a musical setting by a composer. By
understanding the component parts of an art song and
studying how they complement and balance one another,
singers can uncover details about the magical fusion
created when words are linked to music.
As performing artists, we are in the business of creating
and transmitting beauty. We need to be committed to
working beyond memorizing notes and words. We must
remain open to new and/or different ideas about
performance and performance preparation. In the final
analysis, our goal must be an honest re-creation of the
song.
We especially need to work with poetry, which is the
answer to the question “Which came first—the chicken or
the egg?” Singers need to fall in love with poetry and
become fluent reading it. This step is quite often omitted or
glossed over in performance preparation. The first section