Editing Song cycle (section)

{{Short description|Group of songs designed to be performed in sequence as a single entity}}
{{About||the album by Van Dyke Parks|Song Cycle (album)|the works by Graham Waterhouse|Song cycles (Waterhouse)}}

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A '''song cycle''' ({{langx|de|'''Liederkreis''' or '''Liederzyklus'''}}) is a group, or [[cycle (music)|cycle]], of individually complete [[Art song|songs]] designed to be performed in sequence, as a unit.<ref name="Youens">Susan Youens, ''Grove online''</ref>

The songs are either for solo voice or an ensemble, or rarely a combination of solo songs mingled with choral pieces.<ref>One example is the set of Schubert songs from ''The Lady of the Lake''.  See the article on [[Ave Maria (Schubert)|Schubert's "Ave Maria"]].</ref> The number of songs in a song cycle may be as brief as two songs<ref>Called dyad-cycles, according to Youens.</ref> or as long as 30 or more songs.<ref name="Youens" /> 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.<ref name="Youens" /> One of the earliest examples may be the set of seven [[Cantiga de amigo|Cantigas de amigo]] by the 13th-century [[Galicians|Galician]] [[jongleur]] [[Martin Codax]].<ref>Ferreira.</ref> [[Jeffrey Mark]] identified the group of dialect songs 'Hodge und Malkyn' from [[Thomas Ravenscroft]]'s ''The Briefe Discourse'' (1614) as the first of a number of early 17th-century examples in England.<ref>Mark, Jeffrey. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/912405 'The Song-Cycle in England: Some Early 17th-Century Examples'], in ''The Musical Times'', Vol. 66, No. 986 (Apr. 1, 1925), pp. 325-328</ref>

A song cycle is similar to a song collection, and the two can be difficult to distinguish. Some type of [[Coherence (linguistics)|coherence]], however, is regarded as a necessary attribute of song cycles. It may derive from the text (a single poet; a story line; a central theme or topic such as love or nature; a unifying mood; poetic form or genre, as in a sonnet or ballad cycle) or from musical procedures (tonal schemes; recurring motifs, passages or entire songs; formal structures). These unifying features may appear singly or in combination.<ref name="Youens" /> Because of these many variations, the song cycle "resists definition".<ref name="Daverio, Chapter 9, p. 366">Daverio, Chapter 9, "The Song Cycle: Journeys Through a Romantic Landscape", ''German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century'', ed. Rufus Hallmark, p. 366</ref> The nature and quality of the coherence within a song cycle must therefore be examined "in individual cases".<ref name="Daverio, Chapter 9, p. 366"/>