song cycle

A song cycle is a collection of songs that are all linked together by a central theme. The theme could be anything but the classics – birth, love and death – are enduringly popular. Song cycles can also be linked by repeated musical motifs or a series of poems or texts.

A song cycle is a collection of songs intended to be performed together. Often the songs will have a common theme or they might tell a story when performed or heard together. A song is a musical work that is focused on one or more vocal parts, usually vocals that have lyrics (sung words).

An die ferne Geliebte The beginnings of things can be fuzzy. But someone tends to get credit for being the first, and in the case of the song cycle, that person is Beethoven. His “An die ferne Geliebte,” written in 1816, set a collection of six poems to music - not to be performed individually, but together as a single piece.

A song-cycle is a set of songs grouped by a composer in a particular order for performance, often based on a sequence of poems. Song-cycles originated towards the end of the Classical period and rose to their highest point in the Romantic period.

Musical Song Cycles

• 35mm: A Musical Exhibition. Music/Lyrics/Book: Ryan Scott Oliver.
• Elegies: A Song Cycle. Music/Lyrics: William Finn.
• Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens. Music: Janet Hood Lyrics/Book: Bill Russell.
• Fugitive Songs.
• Myths and Hymns.
• Tell Me on a Sunday.
• In Pieces.

How is it different from a revue? A revue usually is a song cycle with some monologues or dialogue somewhere in the show. Musicals that are song cycles, on the other hand, can be numbers written by the same composer that vaguely weave together a theme. Sometimes there is no theme at all, just a series of songs.

a work where part of one movement is recalled in another (examples include Haydn's Symphony No. 46, Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, Mendelssohn's Octet, Schubert's E♭ Trio, Schumann's Piano Quintet, and later pieces by Franck, Brahms, Dvořák, Elgar and Mahler);

The number of songs in a song cycle may be as brief as two songs or as long as 30 or more songs. The term "song cycle" did not enter lexicography until 1865, in Arrey von Dommer's edition of Koch's Musikalisches Lexikon, but works definable in retrospect as song cycles existed long before then.

A Song Cycle is distinguishable from a collection of songs or a Liederspiel by some type of interior cohesion: a unifying theme, text from a single source, a narrative. It could be a musical connection: recurring devices and motifs, key relationships between songs, or perhaps a fixed performance order.

Beethoven, with his An die ferne Geliebte, may have invented the concept of the song-cycle (a group of songs linked by a theme, and usually a poet, that are performed as a sequence without a break), but the composer who raised it to extraordinary heights of expression and beauty was Schubert.

A song cycle is a musical that is told through song - so a collection of songs. It's a non-traditional way of telling a story in that there's little to no dialogue. A song cycle is a bit more abstract, like a 'musical collage', which is why it's being presented as an album first and foremost.

If the cycle goes clockwise, the system does work. If the cycle goes anticlockwise, then the work is done on the system every cycle. An example of such a system is a refrigerator or air conditioner. The Carnot engine is the best example of a cyclic process.