Academic literature on the topic 'Songs (High voice) with orchestra – Analysis, appreciation'

Inside is the Sky is a musical composition for mezzo soprano and chamber orchestra. It is a collection of four songs using poems by renowned Canadian poet Lorna Crozier: A Summer's Singing, In Moonlight, Tautologies of Summer, and Inner Space. The composer wishes to connect music and poetry on a fundamental level. The approach is to write music that responds not to the mere surface of the poems, but rather to their central poetic themes, by means of parameters intrinsic to music: harmony, rhythm, melody, and registral expanse.

For his first work composed without Schoenberg's supervision, Berg chose to set five short poems by his friend and intellectual idol, the controversial poet Peter Altenberg. Carrying the title Filnf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskarten-Texten von Peter Altenberg (1912), the cycle is at once aphoristic (with respect to the songs' duration) and titanic (with respect to their orchestration and motivic density). But the title invites the question: what imagery might the composer have hoped to illustrate with these musical postcards? This thesis investigates text-music relations in Berg's opus 4 with the objective of showing that the music's structure, far from being semantically neutral, participates actively in the création of rich poetic imagery anchored in the socio-cultural context of turn-of-the-century Vienna. Previous studies focus on the work's cyclic motives its interval-cycle substructure. The present study focuses on text-music relations and voice leading - the contrapuntal and harmonie procedures which govern the music's surface and determine its deep structure. It is shown that the voice-leading structures of the individual lieder - in both local detail and at a more broadly conceptual level - give form, meaning, and nuance to the poetic image that emerges in each song, and help define the different facets—physical, emotional, and spiritual — of the protagonist that inhabits them.