The Song Cycle (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Song Cycle Jennifer Ronyak The Song Cycle. By Laura Tunbridge. (Cambridge Introductions to Music.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. [xvii, 230 p. ISBN 9780521896443 (hardcover), $84; ISBN 9780521721073 (paperback), $29.99.] Works list, music examples, illustrations, index, bibliography. Pedagogical guides to art song have traditionally granted the song cycle cursory space, leaving those curious to know more to sort through narrowly focused studies of individual cycles. Laura Tunbridge's The Song Cycle (in the Cambridge Introductions [End Page 303] to Music series) turns this disciplinary model on its head by focusing exclusively on the song cycle in a dazzlingly wide variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century contexts. Befitting the series, the friendly, slim volume successfully introduces readers new to the genre to numerous important works in the tradition, as well as diverse issues surrounding composition, performance, recordings, and reception. Tunbridge's study, moreover, provides ample material for the experienced researcher or performer. It asks challenging questions about the status of the song cycle as a genre, its relationship to operatic and pop traditions, nationalism and exoticism in the works' poetry and music, the formative effect that live and recorded performance practices can have on cycles, and additional aesthetic matters that have enlivened much of the genre's history. Tunbridge departs from the frequently schematic approach of other Cambridge Introductions to "make ports of call at what seem significant moments" in the history of the song cycle (p. 5). She adumbrates this strategy in the first chapter of the book, "Concepts." After describing a handful of foundational ideas concerning cycles, she concretizes these complex issues through a series of brief yet remarkably close readings of seven distinct song cycles. Three of these are canonical (Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte, Schubert's Schwanengesang, and Schumann's Dichterliebe), and four are lesser known (Schubert's Abendröte, Poulenc's Tel jour, telle nuit, as well as the pop concept albums Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson and The Streets' A Grand Don't Come for Free). Tunbridge treats each cycle as a case study in the often contentious issues that define the genre as a whole, providing points of entry into each work along the way. Alongside the wonderful contextual details in these discussions, Tunbridge embarks on musico-poetic analyses that, while sufficiently technical to engage skilled musicians, also use vibrant metaphorical language that should be accessible to readers in other disciplines. Through the disparate examples, Tunbridge outlines not only how a number of composers approached this important sphere of composition, but also how the very notions of coherence or unity so central to the idea of cycles arise as the product of interactions between poets, composers, editors, performers, listeners, and (in the case of both classical and pop concept albums) recording engineers or producers. The rest of the book's chapters proceed roughly chronologically, although they are organized around concepts including nationalism, exoticism, gender, genre boundaries and interrelationships, subjectivity, political contexts, and performance (all of which could be very fruitful starting points for seminar class meetings involving these subjects). Tunbridge's strategic use of close reading continues alongside the comparison of exemplary works and their contexts in the service of these thematic chapter headings. While helpful throughout, this technique proves especially insightful in Tunbridge's discussions of two earlier twentieth-century contexts, where she demonstrates how Schoenberg's and Hinde mith's revisions of cycles responded to the shifting aesthetic and political contexts in which they worked. In particular, through a discussion of Schoenberg's two versions of his Gurrelieder (the first more harmonically and structurally anchored in nineteenth-century techniques than the second), Tunbridge leads into a longer exploration of the very different directions that Schoen berg took with Das Buch der hängenden Gärten and Pierrot Lunaire (pp. 112-14). When Tunbridge moves on to the role of the song cycle for post-World War II composers, she this time uses the same strategy to reverse effect, showing how Hindemith's post-war revisions to Das Marienleben pointed towards conservative tendencies that the genre would come to embody more generally in the later twentieth century (pp. 126-27; 136-39). Numerous additional close discussions...