Vicki Tucker Courtney's Contemporary Art Songs for Women

One of the fun things about conventions and conferences is visiting the vendors and looking for new music that hasn't shown up yet on the shelves of the music store where I usually shop.  At the MMTA Convention in June, I found a wonderful surprise.  Last year in this post I told you how much I love Vicki Tucker Courtney's Contemporary Art Songs for Men, but I had no idea that this book was in the works.

Like the volume for men, all ten songs in Contemporary Art Songs for Women come in low keys and high keys in the same book.  The CD also has accompaniments in both keys.  It's great for those students that sit somewhere in the middle, and sometimes need the high key, but other times need the low key. 

I didn't immediately fall in love with all the songs like I did with the book for men, but the more I go through them, the more I like them.  Sadly, it took me a couple times through the book before it dawned on me that all the poets of the songs were women.  There is a lot of wonderful music in the world by men, but I think sometimes it can be empowering for young women to sing something with both text and music by a woman.  You don't often get that chance.  

There are several poets I'm not familiar with, but there are also two settings of Christina Rossetti's poems ("What Do the Stars do?" and "What Would I Give?") and a beautiful setting of Emily Dickinson's "Will There Really Be a Morning?"  Can there ever be too many settings of that?  My favorite song in the book is "Repetition."  Courtney omits a few lines from Ella Wheeler Wilcox's original poem (That the worship of self is the only sin, And the only devil is greed) and I think I like it that way.  It keeps the song more positive.  

I see these songs as a great bridge for students that are ready for more than folk songs, but not necessarily ready for foreign language art songs.  I hoping the students love these as much as I do.