A Graduate Recital in Voice

The thesis will consist of program notes for my graduate vocal performance recital. The recital included a variety of music from the composers Stanislaw Moniuszko, Wolfgang Mozart, Carl Loewe, Michael Costa, and John Philip Sousa. Each piece was accompanied by program notes that included a brief biography of the composer, information about the piece, text and translation, and a performance reflection. In this recital, I wanted to have a program of pieces that were rarely, if ever, performed. I’m personally part Polish from my moms’ side, which sparked a desire to include something in Polish. The Mozart aria was one of interest for several years. I had wanted to sing it in undergrad, but my voice teacher at the time rightfully said no due to the difficulty of the piece. With the Carl Loewe, I had previously sung Meeresleuchten as a graduate audition piece, and I was curious about the rest of the cycle. I admittedly have rarely enjoyed singing in French, and a lot of the reason is the general style of the music even more then the language itself. Vous qui faites l’endormie gave me a more German styled French piece. I found the oratorio by Costa in a collection on IMSLP and saw it went the lowest pitch-wise out of all of them (Eb 2). I found the Sousa operettas from looking for music for my community band that included soprano saxophone, and noticed some of them were based on operettas. From there I looked for every Sousa operetta score I could find.