Voice-works Spring Study Weekend

Noticeboard: Inspiration & Resources

Who’s in the Lineup?

Here are the eight composers we’ll be focusing on across the weekend. They span more than a century of American musical life, and each one offers something distinctive — in style, in language, and in what their songs ask of the singer.

Amy Beach

A prodigious talent and the first American woman to gain serious recognition as a composer of large-scale classical works. Her songs are elegant, expressive, and firmly rooted in the European Romantic tradition — but with a freshness that’s all her own.

George Gershwin

Bridging the worlds of classical, jazz, and popular music, Gershwin brought rhythmic vitality and natural lyricism into the classical sphere. His songs sparkle with character and often invite the singer to play with style and phrasing.

Kurt Weill

A German-born composer who made America his home, Weill brought a sharp theatrical instinct to his American songs. There’s grit, drama, and political edge here — as well as opportunities for real vocal clarity and text work.

Aaron Copland

Often called the voice of American classical music, Copland captured a sense of openness and spaciousness in his writing. His songs are direct, earthy, and sometimes deceptively simple — with plenty of room for nuance.

Samuel Barber

Barber’s songs are a gift to singers: richly lyrical, beautifully set, and emotionally resonant. He brought a refined sense of vocal line to American music, always attentive to the natural rhythm and shape of the text.

Leonard Bernstein

A true polymath. Conductor, composer, pianist, and educator, Bernstein’s songs are vibrant, witty, and full of personality. He drew freely from jazz, theatre, and classical sources, demanding both agility and presence from the singer.

Carlisle Floyd

Best known for his operas, Floyd’s vocal music is steeped in Southern storytelling. His songs have dramatic weight and emotional bite, with a clear connection to language and character.

Ned Rorem

One of the most prolific American song composers, Rorem wrote with charm, intelligence, and a deep understanding of the voice. His work often feels personal — reflective, thoughtful, and grounded in poetic text.

What you'll be preparing

You’re invited to bring up to four songs, each by a different composer from the main lineup. Think about contrast when you’re choosing: this is your chance to explore a range of styles, moods, and vocal demands — not all slow, not all jazzy, not all minor key. The idea is to stretch your repertoire thinking and to build something you can carry forward beyond the study weekend.

And - you'll need to claim your songs!

Waiting in the wings...

There are a few composers who didn’t make the main list during research, but are very much part of the bigger picture. Florence Price, Stephen Foster, and Charles Ives are all there in the wings — ready to be called upon if something in their writing truly speaks to you.

Consider them your wild cards: if one of their songs feels like an essential part of your next step as a singer, you’re welcome to swap one in.

Voice-works Spring Study for classical singers

Why this repertoire, why this era

Voice-works Study Weekends are about joining repertoire dots between eras, between composers, and between what you are singing and what you are learning. Eight American Greats adds another piece to that wider jigsaw. The idea is to fill in gaps, meet key American voices, and understand how this repertoire connects with your own artistic and technical growth.

We’ll be covering more than a century of song, and what’s striking is how these composers, for all their differences, share a distinctly American way of writing for the voice. You can hear it in the rhythm, in the treatment of text, and in the musical shapes they reach for. It’s a sound that grew out of a particular time and place and went on to shape the development of song as we now know it.

Amy Beach brought late-Romantic colour into an American language; George Gershwin bridged classical and popular style with melodic ease; Kurt Weill carried his European training to America and found a new kind of theatre song full of irony and humanity; Aaron Copland wrote with clarity and breadth, demanding honesty and steadiness; Samuel Barber stayed loyal to classical craft, writing with lyric precision; Ned Rorem, often likened to Poulenc, created songs that feel intimate and conversational; Leonard Bernstein crossed every boundary with rhythm and vitality; and Carlisle Floyd gave American opera its own identity through natural speech rhythm and emotional realism.

Together they show how American song grew from mixed roots - European, theatrical, modernist and folk - and became something unmistakably its own.

Your Process

Why compare our learning processes? This part of our journey began in Autumn 2024, when I encouraged participating singers to share (or start discovering) how we each go about learning repertoire.

The Process Vault
It isn’t compulsory, but I'd like to encourage everyone taking part in a Voice-works Study Weekend to keep a record of their process. That means noticing how you learn, how you absorb, how you choose, and what kind of learner you actually are. It’s one of the most revealing parts of the weekend's study, getting underneath what really makes us singers.

In your event Dropbox folder, you’ll find your own Process Vault. This is a folder where you can store a document or an audio note that captures your experience of learning in preparation for the study weekend: what drew you to a song, what challenged you, what surprised you. It just needs to be in a form that can be transcribed later, so that I can look at and analyse how each person’s process unfolds.

I value this because how we learn is every bit as important as what we learn. From a teaching point of view, it gives real insight into patterns of growth and awareness. Psychologically, it reminds us that learning is not neat, it’s full of repetition, discovery, and change. Artistically, it turns the act of singing into a study of self-understanding. And within the group, sharing glimpses of that process helps us connect; we realise that everyone is in motion, learning in their own way.

I include myself in this. I find recording a quick five-minute audio as I go along, or jotting down a few lines of reflection, surprisingly releasing. It’s often where I make sense of what’s actually happening in my own learning. For example, when I began looking at Samuel Barber’s Nocturne, I noticed how I needed to let the music arrive in my head before I wanted to make sense of it from the copy. I learn best by ear first, letting the melody embed itself almost subconsciously, and then, when I do sit down with the music, I start marking where the rhythm fits, the time signature changes, where the accidentals live, and how the structure holds together. That’s what I mean by process: noticing what really goes on when we learn. Now the melody is becoming my own, an earworm that lives in my head.

A quick note on practicalities
Whatever you choose to upload to your Process Vault needs to be either a typed PDF document or an audio file, something that can be transcribed later. That’s because we’ll be creating transcripts to analyse how each of us learns. The results are fascinating! To see how different these records are, where there’s no right or wrong way, only your way. What matters is that you take the time to notice it because that’s where real learning begins.