Debussy’s extensive vocal music spans his entire career. This chapter places it in the context of the work of Debussy’s contemporaries, focusing on the art of singing as it was practised both in art and popular music. Debussy’s strong predilection for song cycles conceived as triptychs is also discussed at length, and an important comparison drawn with the composer most often linked to Debussy, Maurice Ravel.

While scholars have often acknowledged the relationship between Bernstein and Blitzstein by focusing on their Jewish immigrant backgrounds, shared love for the musical theatre, modernist approach to music, and socio-political goals, there is little discussion on how their sexual orientation might have shaped this friendship and their work. Yet, attempting to understand the bond between the two composers, both married yet unequivocally gay, without considering their queer identities leaves a major component out of the picture. In this chapter, I consider the queer intimacies that are at the core of their bond and how works that they dedicated to each other – Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, an opera about gender alienation; and Blitzstein’s Six Elizabethan Songs, a set of pieces concealing possible homoerotic meanings – can uncover new perspectives on their friendship and compositional approaches.

A study of Elliott Carter’s song cycles and other text settings from the period 1998-2011, with close readings of both poetry and music. Included are individual analytical essays on Tempo e tempi (poetry by Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Giuseppe Ungaretti), Of Rewaking (poems by William Carlos Williams), In the Distances of Sleep (poems by Wallace Stevens), Mad Regales (poems by John Ashbery), “La Musique” (poem by Charles Baudelaire), On Conversing with Paradise (texts from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos), Poems of Louis Zukofsky, What Are Years (poems by Marianne Moore), A Sunbeam’s Architecture (poems by e e cummings), Three Explorations (poems by T. S. Eliot), The American Sublime (poems by Wallace Stevens).