Vocal music, broadly speaking, is any music for the voice. Opera and choral music are often broken out into categories of their own, however, leaving solo song and small-group music with one voice to a part. The allmusic.com site uses this more restrictive definition of vocal music. Audiences raised on popular music may find the sound of classical vocal music unfamiliar, but it's worth making the effort to get past any initial disorientation: (read more)

Vocal music, broadly speaking, is any music for the voice. Opera and choral music are often broken out into categories of their own, however, leaving solo song and small-group music with one voice to a part. The allmusic.com site uses this more restrictive definition of vocal music. Audiences raised on popular music may find the sound of classical vocal music unfamiliar, but it's worth making the effort to get past any initial disorientation: a song in any tradition is a direct, straightforward mode of expression, and classical songs offer a great way into the whole world of classical music. The vocal category encompasses a great deal of music, for songs of various kinds have been as important in the classical music tradition as in any other. It was the Romantics of the nineteenth century, with their strong appreciation for the connection between poetry and music, who brought the art song (as classical songs are known) to its highest point of development. Art songs from German-speaking lands are called lieder, from the German word for "songs," and German composers pioneered the song cycle, set to a group of related poems that might tell a story or explore a single idea. A song cycle might be compared to the album in the era of recorded music; it is a set of songs unified by a single idea. Schubert wrote several great song cycles, of which Winterreise (A Winter Journey) is one. Beethoven, with his comparatively rarely heard An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved), blazed the way for the song cycle as he did for so many other new developments. Schumann and Hugo Wolf were other noted composers of song cycles. Many individual songs that were not part of song cycles have also become well known. Schubert, who once wrote eight songs in a single day, seemed to have a profound understanding of the poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; his setting of the song Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel), from Goethe's play Faust, brings the restless obsession of Goethe's wronged young heroine uniquely to life. Solo songs and those for small groups, of course, have constituted an important genre through the entire history of classical music, from the medieval courtly love songs of Guillaume de Machaut to modern times. The lute song of Elizabethan England is a lovely species of melancholy song, with John Dowland as its greatest practitioner. Many composers of the twentieth century favored the art song as well, for the direct appeal of the human voice and the compact size of most songs helped listeners grasp unfamiliar material. Several composers who wrote art songs in English make good places to start with modern vocal music, for example the iconoclastic New Englander Charles Ives, whose songs quote a whole range of American music in clever and philosophically interesting ways, his fellow American Samuel Barber, whose songs are masterpieces of lyric beauty, and the English composer Benjamin Britten, whose works offer an intelligently conducted tour through the best of English poetry, old and new.(collapse)