A piece of music, usually short and self contained, for voice or voices, accompanied or unaccompanied, sacred or secular. In some modern usage, the term implies secular music for one voice.
A large repertory of song existed in ancient Greece and Rome, but little survives, largely Greek of the Hellenistic period. Any links between Christian and ancient Greek song are probably tenuous. Ancient Jewish song is represented by psalm texts and there may be links between Jewish and Christian practice in psalm singing. Some medieval chant may have been influenced by popular song, but the evidence of surviving melodies is useless for reconstructing it.
The first notated song melodies since antiquity survive from the 9th century. Gregorian chant does not attempt to ‘express’ the text (a much later concept) and the style of word-setting, one or several notes to a syllable, was determined largely by liturgical considerations. The most melismatic settings occur in the chants following the reading of lessons, which are in a sense ‘meditative’. Some non-liturgical Latin song survives in 10th- and 11th-century MSS, and a larger repertory is associated with the goliards (wandering scholars and clerics) of the 12th century. The contemporary Conductus repertory consists of strophic songs generally with Latin texts.
Few vernacular secular lyrics survive from before 1100, but from the next centuries there are numerous examples in the rich flowering of monophonic song among the Troubadours and Trouvères in France and in the German Minnesang (and later Meister-Gesang) repertory. There is some uncertainty about the rhythmic interpretation of this music and the inclusion of instruments. After 1300 French composers set mainly such forms as the Ballade, Rondeau and Virelai, which became almost exclusively polyphonic. A comparable polyphonic repertory existed in 14th-century Italy, with the Ballata, Caccia and Madrigal. Monophonic song became less important in art music after c 1450, but the old forms with their imagery of courtly love remained popular in the polyphonic songs of French and Netherlands composers as late as the 16th century, when they disappeared in favour of the Chanson and the Italian Frottola and Madrigal. The principal German type was the three- or four-voice Tenorlied, which floruited c 1450- c 1550. In England, the strophic Carol remained popular into the 16th century. The desire of some 16th-century madrigal composers to ‘imitate’ the text, often by illustrating individual words, was carried further in the Italian Monody of the early Baroque, in which expressive vocal lines are supported by relatively static basses and simple chords on a lute or other instrument. While songwriting in Italy after c 1630 was largely diverted into the Aria, which had its place within more extended forms such as Cantata and Serenata and in theatrical and church music, the Italian style influenced the German continuo lied as cultivated by Albert, Krieger and Erlebach, and the English lute Air of Dowland and declamatory songs of Henry Lawes and Purcell; it had less influence on the French forms, the Air De Cour and the later types of Air, but reasserted itself in the French cantata at the turn of the century.
In the 18th century a new genre of song arose in France, the romance (a term that in Italy and Spain had long signified a ballad-type song); here it implied an unaffected, sentimental song, sometimes archaistic in character. But the most important developments were in Germany where, by the end of the century, the influence of folksong and hymnody was felt in a simple type of art song, typically with piano, which reached its apogee with Haydn and Mozart and which led, via lesser composers like Zelter and Zumsteeg, to the rich harvest of the 19th-century German Lied.
A far-reaching division occurred in the early 19th-century song repertory between a large ‘popular’ category (recreational song for a mass middle-class market, song for edifying the lower and poorer classes, folksong etc) and a smaller ‘serious’ type which started primarily with Schubert. Some later lied composers, notably Schumann, extended the rhapsodic element; others, such as Mendelssohn and Brahms, were concerned to perfect the musical shape or, like Wolf, to concentrate their attention on declamation and inner meaning.
German influence predominated in the serious art song of Bohemia (Tomášek, Smetana, Dvořák etc), the Netherlands and Scandinavia (Grieg). In France Schubert's songs contributed to the rise of the mélodie, the French counterpart to the lied, brought to perfection by Fauré, Duparc and Debussy. In Russia a national style was cultivated by the Russian Five, especially Musorgsky, and combined with German and French traditions in the songs of Tchaikovsky and Rakhmaninov.
German and French influences, both from the 19th century and from Schoenberg and Satie's followers, have remained central in European 20th-century art song. Traditions were subject to far-reaching experimentation, including the use of Sprechgesang for the voice and ad hoc chamber ensembles for the accompaniment; Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire (1912) uses both. At the same time, new song repertories have developed along more traditional lines in several countries, often stimulated by the recovery of folk music or by the presence of outstanding vocal composers. Both these factors have helped to shape the English-language song repertory as represented in Britain by Vaughan Williams, Finzi, Britten and others, and in the USA, where more popular influences have affected the work of such men as Ives, Thomson and Copland.
The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
