ABSTRACT
In the song ‘Das Wandern’ from Die Schone Müllerin, Schubert uses a 2/4 time to suggest the walking movement, coupled with the repetitive use of eight notes in the bass and then by the sub-division into sixteenth notes. A feature of both Schubert’s songs and Foi songs is the way they textually invoke the sounds of their ambient landscape as metaphors for the very activity of singing itself. In a Foi ‘song cycle’, there is no musical closure at all, only the endless fugal layering of the basic strophic couplet, yet each song brings the subject, a dead man’s life, to a complete closure. The Foi songs are also ‘cyclical’ in another important literal sense, in that each group of men comprising a song group moves from one end of the longhouse to the other and back again during the night as they complete their series of songs.
