Emerging Voices: Art Song and Social Connection

The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society’s (PCMS) Emerging Voices: Art Song and Social Connection, curated in collaboration with tenor vocalist Nicholas Phan, will illustrate how the art song form, with its intersection of poetry and music, remains a powerful vehicle for social exchange. Four concerts and two salons will explore the evolution of the art song and how composers, and the poets whose works they set to music, employed their mediums to express personal and national identity and human connectivity in a quickly changing world. Concert programs at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts’ Perelman Theater and salon concerts at the Stotesbury Mansion will guide listeners through the art song’s history, from Parisian salons at the turn of the 20th century to the form’s proliferation throughout Europe, and eventually to America during and following World War I—featuring compositions by Claude Debussy, Nadia Boulanger, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Leoš Janáček, Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, and Philip Glass, among others. PCMS will also commission New York-based composer Nico Muhly to create a 15-minute work for tenor, string quartet, and piano.

Additional unrestricted funds are added to each grant for general operating support.