"What I particularly appreciated as I read through these texts is that each one is an engaging meditation that combines sound theology with poetic skill. I think they would be an enrichment to any worshiping community and certainly food for personal reflection and prayer." The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church Before Michael Hudson was ordained, he was a successful songwriter in the Contemporary Christian field with 75 hymns to his credit. As his journey led him to become a liberal Anglican, he turned his considerable skill at matching text and tune to writing hymn texts. He began a spiritual discipline of writing a text for each of the gospels of the three-year cycle of Scripture readings. The result is a collection of 153 beautiful, evocative, and very singable poetic hymn texts. Each text can be sung to at least one familiar hymn tune, making the material easily accessible to congregations. A hymn tune index and a thematic index provide additional planning possibilities. Based on the Episcopal lectionary in the Book of Common Prayer, hymn tunes are suggested for each text and are indexed metrically so that substitutions may be made when necessary. Songs may be reproduced for congregational use.

Investigates how other types of music have influenced the scope of the song cycle, from operas and symphonies to popular song --

This volume assembles twelve interdisciplinary essays that were originally presented at the Second International Conference on Word and Music Studies at Ann Arbor, MI, in 1999, a conference organized by the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The contributions to this volume focus on two centres of interest. The first deals with general issues of literature and music relations from culturalist, historical, reception-aesthetic and cognitive points of view. It covers issues such as conceptual problems in devising transdisciplinary histories of both arts, cultural functions of opera as a means of reflecting postcolonial national identity, the problem of verbalizing musical experience in nineteenth-century aesthetics and of understanding reception processes triggered by musicalized fiction. The second centre of interest deals with a specific genre of vocal music as an obvious area of word and music interaction, namely the song cycle. As a musico-literary genre, the song cycle not only permits explorations of relations between text and music in individual songs but also raises the question if, and to what extent words and/or music contribute to creating a larger unity beyond the limits of single songs. Elucidating both of these issues with stimulating diversity the essays in this section highlight classic nineteenth- and twentieth-century song cycles by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss and Benjamin Britten and also include the discussion of a modern successor of the song cycle, the concept album as part of today’s popular culture.

This new study draws on analysis, literary criticism, and source studies to propose a new conception of the nineteenth-century romantic cycle. Rather than a unified whole, the cycle is seen as a fragmentary and open-ended form, which enables Schumann to express the romantic themes of transcendence and ineffability in musical terms.

An adventurer at heart, in August 2016 Joanna embarked on a solo concert tour of the West Coast of the USA...by bicycle. Over the course of 1,154 miles (1,860 km) she performed 16 solo shows between Portland and Los Angeles carrying her musical instruments, camping gear, and everything else she needed upon her bike. This book follows Joanna’s journey from the moment the idea was sparked in Brooklyn to the triumphant completion at Santa Monica Pier, and everything in between. Throw in some sex, drugs, cooperative accomodation services, sleazy men and, of course, more than a little music, and Joanna will take you on the ride of her life.

Sing along with new words that explain how our planets water cycle works to the tune of "Pop goes the weasel."