Of Memories and Dreams: A Song Cycle

Abstract

Beginning from the Medieval period (c. 500-1400), the earliest forms of music, both secular and sacred, involved singing with or without instruments. While Gregorian chant and other styles of a cappella, or unaccompanied, singing pervaded the Catholic church, minstrels and troubadours traveled across Europe singing tales of love, heroic battles, and other stories as entertainment for the royal courts and their nobility. Eventually, composers and musicians began to group these vocal compositions into a set of related pieces. These collections served as the foundation for the development of the "song cycle," a group or collection of songs that are related in some manner. They may be connected by but not limited to a unifying theme, an overarching plot line, a single mood or affect, or texts from a single poet. Because of their unified nature, the individual songs that comprise the overall song cycle, known as "art songs," are designed to be performed sequentially and together. In March 2020 at the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, I began composing the first of four art songs that would eventually become Of Memories and Dreams, a song cycle for a soprano voice and piano. After completing the first piece, I spent the next eight months planning, finding poetry to fit the theme and story, and composing the song cycle. On April 23, 2021, the song cycle received its public premiere with Kathryn Piña, a fellow Texas Christian University student, singing soprano and myself accompanying her on the piano. This paper seeks to describe the inspiration behind the song cycle, the composition process, and an interpretive commentary and analysis over the four songs found in Of Memories and Dreams.