Art
Song
An online forum devoted to art songs by underrepresented composers whose music has been marginalized.

Our Composers

United States

Connie Converse

Connie Converse was one of the first singer-songwriters, but she toiled in obscurity, and her music didn’t become widely known until the first decade of

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France

Nadia Boulanger

Nadia Boulanger was one of the most renowned composition teachers of the twentieth century—or of any century. Her students are a who’s who of famous

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Germany

Marie Vespermann

Marie Vespermann was a quintuple threat: a pianist, singer, composer, poet, and dramatist, who showed prodigious musical gifts as a child. Born into an artistic

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Germany

Marie von Kehler

Precious little is known about the German composer Marie von Kehler. We have more music by her than documentary information about her. She was born

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England

Dame Elizabeth Maconchy

Elizabeth Maconchy was a fiercely individual British composer who wrote music that was often highly dissonant, contrapuntal, intense, even disturbing—and far from the more pastoral,

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Clara Faisst
Germany

Clara Faisst

Clara Faisst was a composer, pianist, and poet who spent the bulk of her life in Karslbad, Germany. In her twenties she studied music in

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Video Recordings

The music by these composers has not been recorded very often, in some cases not at all. This is why one of the purposes of the ASA is to offer quality video recordings of this overlooked repertoire.

Did You Know?

Look out for the question mark icons on this website to find out the little-known but fascinating facts about our composers.
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Fanny Hensel’s op. 1 (a collection of six songs) was published in the summer of 1846, less than a year before she died of a stroke at the age of 41.

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Marie Vespermann appeared in public concerts as young as age nine and began composing songs at age twelve.

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Marie Franz composed a stirring setting of Goethe’s poem “Meine Ruh ist hin,” which is even more turbulent than Franz Schubert’s immortal 1814 setting of the same text — “Gretchen am Spinnrade.”

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Mary Wurm was a gifted piano teacher. In 1914, she published a collection of music designed for the teaching of preschool-age children, The ABCs of Music (Das ABC der Musik).

ASA Creator

Stephen Rodgers is the Edmund A. Cykler Chair in Music and Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship at the University of Oregon, where he has been teaching since 2005. Rodgers’s research focuses on the relationship between music and poetry in art songs from the nineteenth century to the present day, especially art songs by underrepresented composers.

Verse & Music

Join Stephen as he explores how composers transform words into songs in his podcast Resounding Verse.