Song of America

By Ruth C. Friedberg & Robin Fisher

Published 50 years after the last major treatment of American art song, the first edition of the three-volume American Art Song and American Poetry was the first work to fully consider the musical settings of American poetry. In this second edition, now published in a convenient, one-volume format, Ruth Friedberg and Robin Fisher have updated the entries on composers and poets from the first edition and added new individuals to both categories. New composers appearing in this volume include Florence Price, Lee Hoiby, Emma Lou Diemer, Helen Greenberg, Flicka Rahn, Libby Larsen, John Musto, Lori Laitman, Ricky Ian Gordon, and Jake Heggie. Poets now receiving their first treatment are Ezra Pound, Emma Lazarus, Dorothy Diemer Hendry, Dorothy Parker, Willa Cather, Louise Bogan, and William Carlos Williams. As before, musical examples are liberally employed to illustrate specific approaches to poetic text-setting and are much more visually accessible due to present-day digital technology.

Buy online

In the 1920's and 30's, the upper-Manhattan district of New York City called Harlem was the flourishing capital of African-American culture. Writers, musicians, artists, photographers, philosophers, and intellectuals created works that probed the black American heritage with a psychological intensity and a fierce pride.

Photo: Langston Hughes, photographed by Jack Delano, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Digital ID cph 3a43849

More