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.

This study centers on a 1907 collection of art songs for voice and piano composed by Alexander Zemlinsky. Although his small cycle of five songs was not published during the composer's lifetime and has not been given the scholarly attention that other pieces in his oeuvre have, it is well crafted and carries a high degree of expressive and emotional weight. The cycle sets the poetry of Richard Dehmel; a contemporary of Zemlinsky and the inspiration behind works of Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Richard Strauss as well. In these 1905 settings Zemlinsky experiments with an extremely chromatic language while exploring themes of love and betrayal in the poetry of Dehmel. This study examines this chromatic style and how it relates to the themes in the text. Through the detailed analysis of each of the songs the reader will see how, in spite of the free succession of harmonies that often obscure the tonal orientation, a central underlying tonic/dominant relationship is at the core of each song except the first. In this manner the songs display a subtle yet powerful exploitation of tonal ambiguity that brings out many of the nuances of Dehmel's poems. / School of Music

The musical ode, which developed during the 1660s and 1670s as a means of celebrating occasions of particular significance (often by setting a specially written text), remained popular throughout the eighteenth century, and can be regarded as the earliest form of large-scale secular choral music to have developed in England. This dissertation discusses the nature of the genre (including its relationship with the poetical ode), and surveys the contexts in which odes were composed and performed. It is supplemented by a catalogue which lists some 270 examples of the genre. Among the earliest odes were those written for performance at the court in London. These have already been the subject of musicological study, but although they were the biggest stylistic influence on the other odes written during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they were not quite the earliest examples of the species. At the University of Oxford, the practice of performing specially composed odes to enhance academic ceremonial dates from at least 1669, and the custom continued throughout the following century. The odes on St Cecilia's Day also originate in the late seventeenth century, but although the works performed in London between 1683 and 1701 have received some scholarly attention, odes on the same theme written later in the century, along with works performed at a number of provincial centres, have not hitherto been discussed in the context of the wider ode genre. Also neglected have been the birthday odes performed at the Vice-regal court in Dublin during the eighteenth century. These complement the London court odes, but have not previously been listed or discussed in detail. Other odes were written for charitable causes, and to commemorate a miscellaneous array of occasions, including military victories and the inauguration of new buildings. In addition, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, some composers responded to developments in the poetical ode by setting libretti which had no 'occasional' inspiration, but which were notable literary achievements in their own right.

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In a Romantic song cycle or songbook, songs tend to share many common ideas because they are used to set to the poems from one collection written or collected by one author. Many composers designed the same motivic or structural elements to a group of songs for unity, and sometimes they made chronological narratives for the series of poems. Music theorists have tried to find out a way of giving a sense of unity or narrative to the songs in a song cycle or songbook by analyzing its musical language and text setting. They have suggested plausible explanations for the relationships among the songs in a song cycle or songbook, and some theorists have traced the tonal movements and provided a visual explanation for them. Hugo Wolf's two volumes of the Italienisches Liederbuch (1890-91, 1896) were set to the forty-six poems from Paul Heyse's well-selected works. Wolf's way of selecting poems from Heyse's collection seems inconsistent, and his song ordering in the both volumes does not show evident rules. However, a closer study for relationships between the songs could widen our perspective to comprehend the whole songbook as a unified storyline. This study selected the first four songs from each volume of the Italienisches Liederbuch, and analyzed the eight songs in a traditional way, accounting for harmony, motivic feature, tonal movement, form, and text setting. The study finds that Wolf used the third relationships among the songs to convey a storyline in his order of the songs, and especially exploited the direction of thirds for his own narrative. While this may only be a pilot study with partial results, it can serve as a stimulus for a comprehensive study of factors that provide unity in the cycle as a whole.

This composition is a single-movement work for three choirs and full orchestra, including celesta, piano, and four percussionists. Total duration is fifteen minutes. The music is divided into six sections, with the overall form being substantially influenced by the structure of the poem, War Is Kind, by Stephen Crane (1871-1900). Many devices are utilized to contrast tension and relaxation, as associated with ironic elements of the text, with repetition and development of musical elements and motives providing unity for the entire work.

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This song cycle consists of ten settings, and has been divided into two parts by the composer. Each part is preceded by a short quotation in Latin which has been inserted by the composer. The two parts of the cycle are evidently meant to typify the division of a human life into the periods of youth and old age. The Latin quotations which divide the cycle into its two parts are taken from the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible, Psalm 89, verse six.

Gwen Harwood is one of Australia’s most celebrated poets. Her longstanding collaboration with composer Larry Sitsky produced six substantial operas between 1963 and 1982; Fall of the House of Usher (1965); Lenz (1970); Fiery Tales (1975, based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and excerpts from Boccaccio’s Decameron); Voices in Limbo (1977); The Golem (1980, first performed in 1993); and De Profundis (1982, a setting of Oscar Wilde’s letters). Both Harwood and her critics acknowledge the libretti as some of her best writing (Harwood cites her libretto for Lenz as her ‘selected poem’); to date, there has been no major study of these works. This thesis engages with Harwood’s opera texts, arguing for readings that are neither atomist nor reductive but jointly focused on both the effect of the text and the mechanics of its production. It begins by outlining the theoretical terrain of words and music studies and establishes an approach to Harwood and Sitsky’s operas based on the idea that opera’s textual exaggeration is a function of its multiple critical components; that is, the intersection of words and music, collaborative authorship, and dramatic language. The thesis then offers focused studies of each of these aspects in Harwood and Sitsky’s works, constructing a literary picture of the opera texts. Primary sources include the scores of the operas (usually copies of the composer’s autograph), selected correspondence between Sitsky and Harwood, drafts and typescripts of the libretti (held in the National Library, Canberra, and the Fryer Library, University of Queensland), and selected essays by Harwood on her words for music. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1331575 / Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2008