Solo Vocal Music

The desire to transform words into song spans the entire history of music.
The music of the troubadours and trouvères (schools of poet-musicians
in 12th and 13th century France) is our earliest written record of a
significant tradition of secular, solo song. Since then, the repertory of solo
song has grown tremendously and is amazingly varied. For example, there
are introspective lute songs from Elizabethan England and cantatas from
the Italian Baroque that are operatically intense. In the Romantic period,
the "art song" became an important form. Over the past two centuries, the
song repertory has grown enormously. The song cycle is a related form in
which a set of individual songs is composed as an indivisible unit. The
songs in a cycle are generally unified in some way: they can be based on
poems by the same poet, they can tell an extended story, or might simply
have a similar mood.