Henri Dutilleux, haunted by Baudelaire

One of the leading French composers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013) set only one text by Baudelaire, though he said that the poet was the artist in any medium who had the strongest impact on him; indeed, he said that ‘Baudelaire continues to haunt me.’ This article explores how this ‘haunting’ affected Dutilleux’s oeuvre, from his cello concerto Tout un monde lointain… [‘A Far Distant World’] (1967-1970) whose five movements are each preceded by a Baudelaire epigraph, through to his final completed work, the song cycle Le Temps l’horloge [‘Time the Clock’] (2006-2009) which concludes with a setting of Baudelaire’s prose poem Enivrez-vous [‘Be Intoxicated’]. Le Temps l’horloge also features settings of poems by Jean Tardieu and Robert Desnos, and Baudelaire’s poetry and art criticism were centrally important to both these writers. The multiple interrelationships between Baudelaire, Tardieu, Desnos, and Dutilleux are traced in this article, and analysis of ‘Enivrez-vous’ shows it to be the summation of Dutilleux’s output.

Cruel Optimism, Ironic Pessimism, Poetic Terrorism

Meyoucycle (2016) was the eagerly awaited result of a collaboration between choreographer Eleanor Bauer and composer Chris Peck. The characters of this dance and song–cycle have developed tactics to withstand the exploitative demands of neoliberal semiocapitalism; the creative team deployed performative and dramaturgical tactics for the same purpose.

Voicing Rupture: Resisting docility through performances of feminine agency in Arnold Schoenberg’s Das Buch der hängenden Gärten

<p>My experience of learning and performing Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, can be explored through the lens of Foucault’s ‘docile bodies’ theory – that is, bodies that are ‘subjected, used, transformed, improved’. Participating in the disciplinary practice of self-policing, my obedience to the social, cultural and musical orders shaping western art song performance is enforced through self-imposed internalisation of normative practices and values. The singer’s body – my own body – is regulated in the Foucauldian sense; ‘disciplined’ through training and conditioning to align with normative practices, and, simultaneously, I act as ‘discipliner’ through self-imposed policing and monitoring of my body. The compulsive need to engage in the acts and processes of discipline implies inherent deficiency or deviance; the body must be transformed and ‘corrected’ through the processes of discipline that reflect the internalised value systems a body is measured against. In this exegesis, I explore my processes of self-regulation as disciplined and discipliner, investigating an intersection of ideals and tensions in my pursuit of technical command of vocal technique, obedience to the score, and the expectation of emotional abandon that an expressionist song cycle demands. Framed through narratives of ‘service’ and ‘prohibition’, I position the political anatomy of an eroticised, reproductive female body, exploring resistance and ‘rupture’ through the sexual agency of a disobedient and disruptive female singer.</p>

Voicing Rupture: Resisting docility through performances of feminine agency in Arnold Schoenberg’s Das Buch der hängenden Gärten

<p>My experience of learning and performing Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, can be explored through the lens of Foucault’s ‘docile bodies’ theory – that is, bodies that are ‘subjected, used, transformed, improved’. Participating in the disciplinary practice of self-policing, my obedience to the social, cultural and musical orders shaping western art song performance is enforced through self-imposed internalisation of normative practices and values. The singer’s body – my own body – is regulated in the Foucauldian sense; ‘disciplined’ through training and conditioning to align with normative practices, and, simultaneously, I act as ‘discipliner’ through self-imposed policing and monitoring of my body. The compulsive need to engage in the acts and processes of discipline implies inherent deficiency or deviance; the body must be transformed and ‘corrected’ through the processes of discipline that reflect the internalised value systems a body is measured against. In this exegesis, I explore my processes of self-regulation as disciplined and discipliner, investigating an intersection of ideals and tensions in my pursuit of technical command of vocal technique, obedience to the score, and the expectation of emotional abandon that an expressionist song cycle demands. Framed through narratives of ‘service’ and ‘prohibition’, I position the political anatomy of an eroticised, reproductive female body, exploring resistance and ‘rupture’ through the sexual agency of a disobedient and disruptive female singer.</p>

«Воспитательно-образовательные возможности авторской песни на примере песни В.Моисеевой "О Войне" и песни "Гурзуф" из цикла песен В. Моисеевой «Крымские Арабески»»

Today there is an acute problem of educating the creative potential of the younger generations, their artistic taste, preferences. Among the goals and objectives of education - the formation of artistic thinking (and as a variety - musical thinking) is very relevant. Therefore, the article considers some problems of the development of creative activity as the basis of artistic and musical thinking. Based on the study of the methodology of working on songs, it is necessary to determine the effectiveness of the influence of the author's song for voice and piano accompaniment on the formation of holistic ideas about the surrounding nature, the social environment of the cities of Crimea, the place of a person in it, self-esteem, the harmonious manifestation of patriotic feelings. Creation and testing of a song cycle as an accompanying material in solving the tasks of the regional component in education.

Die Winterreise and Winterreise: A Comparison of Wilhelm Müller’s Cycle of Poems and Franz Schubert’s Cycle of Songs for Voice and Piano

This article examines closely the textual origins of Schubert’s Winterreise in order to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between Wilhelm Müller’s set of poems and Franz Schubert’s song cycle based on those poems. A study of the genesis of the poetry and the final arrangement of poems in both Müller’s and Schubert’s cycles illustrates a contrast between a work of hope and another of despair.

António Fragoso’s Canções do Sol Poente: A Song Cycle of Saudade from the Renascença Portugesa

Portuguese art song is an underexplored niche in the song recital repertoire. One factor that makes it difficult for singers to make sense of it is the limited information on Portuguese culture. In this discussion of the music of Fragoso and the texts of António Correia de Oliveira in relation to the cycle Canções do Sol Poente (Songs of the Setting Sun), the author provides cultural and historical information with particular reference to the Portuguese concept of saudade, with discussion on how saudade is intertwined with the movements of nationalism, neoromanticism, and saudadismo of the 1890s that led to the Portuguese revolution in 1911 and the subsequent blossoming of creative arts in the nation.

Whitman and Stevenson: Singing the Nation from Scotland to Sāmoa via Ohio and Hawai‘i

This chapter explores the role of song in the intermingled reception of Whitman’s and Robert Louis Stevenson’s work. The first section introduces Stevenson’s part in disseminating Whitman’s work in Polynesia, discussing Stevenson’s writings on Polynesian song and his friendships with Hawai’ian musicians King David Kalākaua and Queen Liliʻuokalani with whom he shared an interest in Whitman. It suggests the importance of song to their understandings of cultural authority and challenges to colonial influence. The second section considers several composers – including Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ernst Bacon – who set work by both Whitman and Stevenson, focusing particularly on James H. Rogers’ song cycle In Memoriam (1919). It considers the ways in which relationship between the two writers was constructed by these composers and their critics and explores the role of anthologising – whether in poetry anthologies or song cycles – in constructions of national identity and exoticism.

Schubert Winterreise Dataset

This article presents a multimodal dataset comprising various representations and annotations of Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise . Schubert’s seminal work constitutes an outstanding example of the Romantic song cycle—a central genre within Western classical music. Our dataset unifies several public sources and annotations carefully created by music experts, compiled in a comprehensive and consistent way. The multimodal representations comprise the singer’s lyrics, sheet music in different machine-readable formats, and audio recordings of nine performances, two of which are freely accessible for research purposes. By means of explicit musical measure positions, we establish a temporal alignment between the different representations, thus enabling a detailed comparison across different performances and modalities. Using these alignments, we provide for the different versions various musicological annotations describing tonal and structural characteristics. This metadata comprises chord annotations in different granularities, local and global annotations of musical keys, and segmentations into structural parts. From a technical perspective, the dataset allows for evaluating algorithmic approaches to tasks such as automated music transcription, cross-modal music alignment, or tonal analysis, and for testing these algorithms’ robustness across songs, performances, and modalities. From a musicological perspective, the dataset enables the systematic study of Schubert’s musical language and style in Winterreise and the comparison of annotations regarding different annotators and granularities. Beyond the research domain, the data may serve further purposes such as the didactic preparation of Schubert’s work and its presentation to a wider public by means of an interactive multimedia experience. With this article, we provide a detailed description of the dataset, indicate its potential for computational music analysis by means of several studies, and point out possibilities for future research.