The Song's the Thing

Just sing. Really, just sing.

Jonas Kaufmann. Photo by Gregor Hohenberg.

Doppelganger at the Armory

There are plenty of commonly used descriptions for music that are inherently meaningless, and the one among the most bothersome and frustrating is “art song.” The supposedly serious definitions of that term explain that it is a song, usually for solo voice and piano, in the classical tr…