For Starters

Etude 1 helps the teacher with getting started in giving voice to children’s artistry and provides materials for implementation in the music classroom and children’s chorus. It is designed to help the teacher reach and teach the musical mind. It provides songs and chants for tonal and rhythm narratives in the various tonalities and meters, with very short art songs that draw children deeper into tonality and into the choral art. This Etude can be directly applied to the music classroom or children’s chorus for activities, recordings, or warm-ups. This Etude is also designed for professional development, so the teacher can work independently with the various meters and tonalities as needed to develop greater competence and confidence in using them with children. The materials of this Etude can be used with singers of all ages.

Teaching Exploration of Ma Shuilong’s Ancient Chinese Poetry Art Songs – “Spring Silkworms are Dead,” “Loneliness,” and “Falling Flowers”

Ma Shuilong was a famous composer in Taiwan, both at home and abroad. In 1986, the publication of his concerto, Bangdi, made him the first Chinese composer to have a full performance at the Lincoln Arts Center in New York. In the field of vocal music production, “Ma Shuilong Songs Collection” reflected the mutual infiltration and integration of Chinese and Western elements, especially the combination of modern techniques and classical poetry so that Chinese ancient poetry art songs would emit unique artistic conception. In view of his three works, this article elaborates the oriental connotation in their creation through the study of the poetries involved and further extracts the characteristics of the creation and singing of ancient poetry art songs in order to provide significant references for the teaching of Chinese art songs.

Dylan Thomas’s “In the White Giant’s Thigh”:A Wild Love of Art Song

In the poem “In the White Giant’s Thigh,” Dylan Thomas projects the contemporary poets’ wild passion for Eliotian amoral art song and their suffering and the contradistinction of his own occasional love of Yeatsian Grecian altruistic art song and his delight. The poem is at bottom optimistic as it offers the metaphysical and the metempirical wild lovers an alternative process of art song and also carries salvation to transcend their sorrowful failure. It is Thomas’s faith in the Yeatsian process of transfiguration and transformation, the possibility of deliverance from the bondage of experience and ignorance that assures him of success and appeal in his art songs, that Auden repudiates in his metaphysical process of transgression and transmigration and his immortal vision of aesthetic amoral art song. The poem implies that Auden, as a result of his continual ignorance of the human reality of life and death, his stoic love of metaphysical art and reality, loses his grandeur and literary reputation and stoops to the level of a common man susceptible to hatred and indignation, violence and vengeance like the victims of his art songs, the political, the war and the Movement poets who remain equally ignorant of the metaphysical process and the reality of breath and death.

Mastering the Aria through Song: Daron Hagen’s Amelia, “Apostrophe to the Stars,” and Selected Hagen Art Songs

Contemporary arias in English are too often excluded from student repertoire because they are perceived as being overly complex atonal works that are too challenging for the student. In order to counter this misconception, voice teachers should foster curiosity within students to seek repertoire with an open mind. Exploring music of living composers such as Daron Hagen can ignite student interest in contemporary art song and opera literature that expands the realms of what is thought to be traditional or appropriate vocal repertoire for students seeking a professional singing career.

RHYTHMIC SEMANTIC STRUCTURES “PARTICULARS AND UNIVERSALS” IN THE LYRICS OF ART SONGS AND ALGORYTHMS OF THEIR DETECTION

In order to study holistic cultural phenomena, including art songs, a tool reminiscent of LR(k)-parser of context-free grammars has been formalized. With the help of this algorithm a two-pass analysis of two works by different authors, united by the common theme of overcoming, was carried out. Two common structures were revealed in the texts: the semantic alternation of the "particulars and universals" oppositions (PU-rhythm) and the arrhythmic motif of overcoming (O-structure).

Dylan Thomas’s “Over Sir John’s Hill”: The Motif of His Art Songs

In the last dramatic art song “Over Sir John’s Hill,” Dylan Thomas reiterates that the motif of his art songs has been the Yeatsian introspective process of individuation and integration, transfiguration and transformation, the mortal vision of Grecian altruistic art song as seen in his early poem 18 Poems. His Yeatsian process of tragic happiness, his warm impersonal art, his paradoxical sensibility that makes him an artist of success and popularity in contrast to W.H. Auden’s Eliotian motif of metaphysical process of self-annihilation and immortal art, his aesthetic amoral impersonal art, his tragic vision of art song which deprives him of his grandeur and influence. However, the main thrust is extending to the dismembered and discontented Auden the very same process of regeneration that Thomas has offered to the victims of Auden’s art song while ignoring everything about … allegations of tilting, toppling and conspiracy against him. The song also testifies to his Yeatsian cosmopolitan culture maintaining his equanimity and magnanimity when he confronts an atmosphere of envy and ill-will, and hatred and violence.