About this work:
A Modern Songbook is a three-volume collection of songs for voice and piano, one volume each for high voice, medium voice, and baritone. The songs were composed between 2016 and 2024. Several of them appear in multiple versions to accommodate different voice types. Several others are assigned to specific voices.
Most of the poems set here date from the early twentieth century. In part this is because the years between 1900 and 1928 offer a rich trove of public domain texts, but in part it is because this was the time in which the English language assumed the modern idiom that we still use today a century later. The language of these poems has a distinct quality of freshness about it that has always attracted me. For that reason I felt no sense of discontinuity in translating several texts originally written in other languages, by Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Rilke, into the English idiom of the present.
The range of poets is broad. The big names are here, most of them represented by their earlier work, but so too are poets who have been neglected or forgotten. In a few cases the texts have been slightly altered; in others the texts are composites.