SSP 2025: THE BOX

The conventions we’ve enacted over the centuries of this genre have resulted in some strongly perceived barriers. We’re asking: What are the confines of this art form? What puts it in a “box”? Some examples we’ve talked about are these prevalent, expected “standards” in art song performance, both in educational and professional settings, including but not limited to: language; style; genre; audiences—who is in the audience and their unspoken ‘code of conduct’; performances spaces; theme (or lack thereof); dress code (performers and audiences); collaborating instruments; and so on. 

Song Summit 2025 is a project to identify the walls of the box, and then discover and implement ways to cut down the walls of the box in our performances and/or teaching over the performing season and academic year 2024-2025. We invite you to submit your thoughts and experiments for display on the Blog/Vlog Entry Page. Please include your information, title of your project, description of your project, and upload a file of your program and/or link to your performance.

Then, in August 2025, we will host the first Song Summit “2025: THE BOX” at Source Song Festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where participants can come and report their findings and discuss the changes we made and results that occurred, and discover together how evolving beyond the past “standards” of art song—breaking of out this box—can grow it as a genre, perhaps even influence the future of music in our country and culture. 

WHY SSP? There has been discussion about the purpose of ‘art song’ for decades, if not hundreds of years: how to identify it; how and/or where to perform it; who should listen to it; what should or should not be included in the canon; and so on. Research for the 2024 CS Magazine article concluded that there is a lot of talk, and some innovative and effective ideas and practices, but altogether insufficient collective and widespread action to a) compile the information of such discussions and b) use it to effect necessary change not only for the preservation and continuation of this art form, but also using it as a means of wider reach in musical education, efficacy, and overall contribution to humanity’s experience. 

WHAT IS SSP? The Song Summit Project is an ongoing, collective meeting-of-minds and action initiative of the community of what has been traditionally referred to as ‘art song’--the blending of poetry and music into one, new artistic work. Its purpose is to discuss and discover both contributions and limitations in our genre, and instigate and motivate action, where needed, to produce ideological, practical, inclusive—or, in some cases, exclusive—evolution in the creation, production, study, and scholarship of the art of song. It is an idea born out of the result of interviews and research for the article “Art Song in America Now”, by Elisabeth Marshall, D.M., for Classical Singer Magazine in 2024. The adaptable collective is ideally comprised of song vocalists, pianists, composers, poets, organizational founders and board members, fans and audience members, educators, students, and other devotees of song.

WHO IS SSP? SSP invites participation—at any and all levels—by all members of the song community (as described above) who feel as though they have something to contribute and want to. The participants in the 2024 CS Magazine article were: Libby Larsen, composer; Clara Osowski, mezzo-soprano and co-founder of Source Song Festival; Reginald Mobley, Grammy-nominated countertenor; Laura Strickling, Grammy-nominated soprano; Martha Guth, soprano and co-founder of Sparks & Wiry Cries; Michael Brofman, pianist and founder/Artistic Director of Brooklyn Art Song Society; Samuel Martin, pianist and founder/Artistic Director of Cincinnati Song Initiative.