ABSTRACT
If modern programmatic chamber music raises questions of temporality and voice, the genre of vocal chamber music, works for voice and chamber ensemble, deals with issues of the direct interplay between words and music, issues of structure and comprehensibility, and a new theatricality in music. Here I will ignore works for voice and piano and for voice and guitar, topics so vast that they demand their own treatment. I will also pass over settings of poetry in which a voice is accompanied by a small chamber ensemble as it might be by a single pianist. (I am thinking here of works such as Samuel Barber’s Dover Beach, a setting of Matthew Arnold’s poem for voice and string quartet, in which attention is focused on the voice; or like Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, for soprano and eight cellos, again a piece for voice and a subordinate, if striking, homophonic accompaniment.) In this chapter I am concerned rather with works such as Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître, discussed in chapter 1, in which there is a real interplay between the voice, as an instrument, and the surrounding chamber ensemble; and in works that show direct and indissoluble links between poetic materialwhether technical, structural, or aesthetic-and the music composed on that material.
