English, dummy! That’s the answer I’ve always wanted to give to the person who asks me what my favorite language is to sing. How could it be anything else? English is my language, and since for me good singing is the communication of the ideas behind the words through the music, I like to sing what I can communicate best.

I can't imagine why anyone would not prefer to sing in his or her native language. I will never bring to another language the lifetime of experience I have in English. When I read an English poem I am aware of the unusual choice of word or image that makes a line special. Individual words have an aura around them -- we bring a set of associations to any word we read or say. I cannot reproduce that in French or German, which are my second and third languages, because I haven't lived them, even though I can speak them sing them well enough to persuade a native speaking audience that I am a native too. When I sing I want to bring the words to life every bit as much as the music, and therefore the spontaneity I have in English where no translation is taking place is what I like best.

I also love feeling the audience react to the words without having to refer to translations. There is no question in my mind that the Germans prefer their songs almost to the exclusion of all others. I love to sing German songs in Germany and know how closely I am being followed. And I remember singing a recital in Paris in a hall small enough so that when I started the all French second half I could hear someone say, "Ah, now for the real music." Singing in English in America allows me to tell people stories they can understand at once. Without question they love that experience and so do I.

There are many people who have written or said that English is not a good language to sing. I think unequivocally that is nonsense. Every language is a good language for singing if you take care to speak it beautifully. As I travel around the country teaching master classes I find lots of young singers with gorgeous voices, I find many who use them very well, but I find few who speak remotely as well as they sing. That isn't really surprising. We spend years training our singing mechanism, but take little if any time learning to declaim a text. We study differing musical styles and learn to differentiate Mozart's musical vocabulary from Schumann's from Schönberg's, but we don't consider whether Emily Dickinson requires different speech from Tennessee Williams or Blake. We singers must have the facility to project all the different sounds of English and should take pleasure in doing so.

But I think a lot of American singers aren’t trained to do that. We spend so much time on producing sound that it becomes an end in itself rather than a means to an artistic performance. And we compound the problem by ignoring our native language as long as possible. Most of us start our training with scales, arpeggios, etc., and when we are ready for a piece of music, we almost invariably get something in Italian, usually a Vaccai exercise or something from the Schirmer early Italian aria book. We are taught to treat these pieces as vocalizes, as means to "get the voice out." Often we don't even bother to translate them. In so doing we absorb an invidious, subliminal message: the words don't matter much, it's the sound that counts. And not surprisingly, we all too often hear singers who use words and music as vehicles for their voices rather than the other way around.

After we work on Italian songs and arias we generally get some Schubert, and probably some Fauré or Debussy. Since most of us don't speak German and French we treat them as we did the Italian songs. Regrettably, that may mean that we don't even translate them, although more often we do and we know what they are about. We probably have learned to project the emotion of the song, but we are really accomplishing that by conveying the music specifically and the words generally. We have relatively little compunction about sacrificing the words to musical or vocal considerations. Finally, and usually when we are preparing for an audition, someone says, "You'd better have something in English." And then we encounter a problem. In English we know precisely what the words mean, and we would like to project their emotional content as clearly as that of the music and we haven't been trained to do that. I think that if we started our vocal training in our native language and therefore confronted the challenge of music plus words early, we might resolve that conflict more successfully. And to do that we need to know what repertoire to work on.

When I was a student, even though I went into singing because I wanted to sing Schubert and Poulenc, I knew I wanted to perform a lot in English. I wasn’t attracted at that time to the English school of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and I didn’t want to confine myself to Purcell and the Lutenists, so I started looking for American repertoire which I thought would be closer to my own taste. My first discoveries with Theodore Chanler and Richard Hundley and Ives and I sang them a lot, but that was more or less the extent of my knowledge. But I wanted to make a contribution to the Bicentennial celebration, and I proposed to the 92nd Street Y in New York City a series of three concerts of unknown American songs. They were enthusiastic about the idea, it only remained for me to come up with the material. I asked all the composers I knew if they had written songs and I did research in books, libraries, music stores, and other singers’ collections. I amassed well over 1,000 songs and then started in to read through them. By the time I had finished that fascinating experience I had no trouble compiling three programs full of treasures.

Since that time, I have continued to learn new material and I am now convinced that the American song repertory trails only the German and French in its quality and diversity. My life has changed: from hardly knowing whom to program I now find it indispensable in my full year course on American song at Juilliard to teach: Argento, Barber, Beach, Beaser, Berg (Christopher, that is), Bernstein, Bolcom, Bonds, Bowles, Carpenter, Chadwick, Chanler, Cipullo, Convery, Copland, Corigliano, De Blasio, Dello Joio, Diamond, Dougherty, Duke, Farwell, Flanagan, Gideon, Gilbert, Gordon, Griffes, Gruenberg, Hagen, Hoiby, Hundley, Ives, Larsen, Liebermann, Musto, Nevin, Paulus, Perle, Persichetti, Platt, Rorem, Schuman, Smith (Larry Alan), Still, Talma, Thomas, Thomson, Weber, Weisgall, and Wilson. This list, large as it is, is incomplete. I apologize to anyone I have inadvertently left off - I just wanted to give an idea of the breadth of our repertory, not to be exhaustive. Anyone who wants a more complete listing should consult Victoria Villamil’s excellent book, A Singer’s Guide to the American Art Song, 1870-1980, published by the Scarecrow Press or the National Association of Teachers of Singing publication Art-Song in the United States, An Annotated Bibliography. They are both extremely valuable in providing ideas and giving descriptions of individual songs.

A few of these composers are justifiably known to all lovers of American music: Ives, Barber, Copland, Rorem, Argento and Bolcom. I love all of them but in this article I want to focus on three others, perhaps less well known outside the world of song, but all very close to my heart - Theodore Chanler, Richard Hundley and John Musto.

About thirteen years ago I put together a songbook for G. Schirmer of turn-of-the-century American songs called Songs of an Innocent Age. Afterwards Schirmers asked me if I had any other projects I wanted to do. I suggested that they reissue all the Theodore Chanler songs that had gone out of print. The volume was delayed until last year but it is finally available and with the Boosey & Hawkes publication of the “Eight Epitaphs” almost all of his songs are now in print. The Schirmer collection includes all the songs that had previously been published by anyone and several that had never been published before that I found in the Library of Congress. It’s a wonderful volume. What do I find is so special pleasure about Chanler? Well, his songs are scrupulously well composed - you really feel he knows what he is doing with every pitch. I find French music and jazz to be his two strongest influences - it seems as if he filtered his American sensibility through a French lens. Perhaps he gained his wonderful compositional clarity from his studies with Nadia Boulanger; in any case, his wonderful piano parts are extremely sophisticated and challenging and his voice lines are eminently singable. He covers a substantial range of moods from almost religious seriousness to broad humor. His choice of texts is occasionally less than ideal - he set some awfully precious poems - but that is my only quarrel with his songs. When I was a beginning singer, I was hesitant to program a piece as obviously “jazzy” as “The Doves,” but as I got older and smarter I sang it all the time. I think “Memory” is as beautiful a song as any American has written and I have probably finished more recitals with his marvelous “I Rise when You Enter” than with any other song.

Richard Hundley says his objective as a composer is “to crystallize emotion.” He succeeds amazingly well. Some of his pieces I find heartstoppingly beautiful: “The Astronomers,” “Come Ready and See Me,” “Waterbird.” He has mastered the art of agonizing over details until he produces something that sounds simple, even inevitable. I think he has taken the apparent simplicity of his teacher and friend Virgil Thomson and invested it with more urgent emotion. His melodies stay in the mind. In his harmonies and open spacings he sounds American in the sense that Copland created a recognizably American sound. And he has the American gift for exuberance and humor: look at “Epitaph on a Wife,” “Some Sheep are Loving,” “Postcard from Spain,” and “I Do!” for examples.

Hundley’s training differs from many other Americans - he never went abroad to study, and he credits his three years in the Metropolitan Opera chorus and his even longer stint as accompanist for Zinka Milanov’s lessons as formative to his gifts as a song writer. There is no question that he understands both the voice and piano perfectly. And singers love his songs. My only regret is that more of them aren’t published. There are only three volumes of songs with Boosey & Hawkes and a few single songs originally published by General Music that are now handled by Boston Music Co. Others can be found by contacting him directly.

His songs, like Schubert’s, are easy to fuse into wonderful recital groups - he writes every kind of song: slow, fast, wet, dry, funny, moving, waltzes, fox-trots, major statements, little bonbons. His set of songs, “Octaves and Sweet Sounds,” is the only collection he has put together and suggested that they be performed as a group. They can also be excerpted but they work very well as an entity. Happily, Hundley is still producing marvelous pieces; as I write this I am about to premiere what we hope is the final version of a delightful setting of Vachel Lindsay’s “The Whales of California.” I say we hope it’s the final version because he likes to make adjustments until he’s sure he’s got it right. When he does get it right, it certainly is right - I’ve been singing “The Astronomers” for nearly thirty years and haven’t grown tired of it. As crystallized emotion, it is a gem.

John Musto writes songs because he grew up loving popular songs and because he loves to read poetry. He rarely reads novels preferring the short, self-contained, distilled form of a poem. He doesn’t think about style, he simply reads the poem and if he is attracted to the content and thinks the form of the poem makes it setable, he proceeds and the appropriate music comes out. His taste gravitates to serious poems and he thinks that the socially conscious pop song texts of the 60’s provided him with the example of how meaningful texts could serve for songs. Musto’s songs also show a strong jazz influence, particularly the blues. I think of him as the master of the 6th. The introductions to “Lament,” “Could Be,” “Requerdo,” and “Litany” are wonderful examples of how Musto transforms a blues heritage into sophisticated concert pieces. He is largely self-taught as a composer - he was a piano major at the Manhattan School of Music and is a prodigious pianist both in classical repertory and as a pop music improviser. He has obviously studied and absorbed a broad spectrum of twentieth century styles and has incorporated them into a highly personal style that ranges from easily accessible songs like “Litany” and “Social Note” to extremely complex, even thorny works like his cycle “Quiet Songs” which he wrote for his wife, Amy Burton. Compared with Chanler and Hundley, Musto’s songs are more complex, certainly more difficult to learn and master, more extreme in musical, vocal and pianistic demands but no less rewarding for the performers or the audience. Musically, he has no more hesitation in using a 12 tone row than Leonard Bernstein did, but he, like Bernstein, then manages to produce a piece that audiences don’t find forbidding. Fortunately all his songs are published by Peer-Southern Music and are readily available. Some critics accuse American song composers of being “lightweight” - no one could level that criticism at Musto. He has already produced a significant number of truly important songs and shows every intention of continuing to do so.

For American singers not to feature our own music is foolish for our own growth as artists and for the future of the form. Any art form that only looks backward may back itself into its own grave. To keep our art alive I urge all singers to find their favorite new composers and support them. Many critics have foretold the death of the song recital - I think they’re wrong, because the songs are too good to go away. Song writing is very healthy in this country at this time and has been for the last 100 years. Look, find, sing and enjoy!