Documentary Song Cycles

Abstract

I write documentary song cycles. I’m interested in using the song cycle as a narrative genre, to create an intimate theatre of the imagination, and to tell stories about queer life.

Relative to most genres of art music, the song cycle began acquiring its canon quite quickly after its first appearance. This is potentially because of the strong consonance between the intimacy of song cycles and the intimacy of the salons in which they were first performed. Those performances sat in a middle ground between concert and theatrical performance, between public and private, and were often combined with poetry readings, instrumental music, and intimate conversation.

Having written a series of four song cycles about queer life in London in the past 100 years, my work is now concerned with using the same principles of song cycle composition in a wider variety of music, not just for voice and piano.

Those principles include: a compositional use of the extent to which a performer engages an audience or is simply observed by an audience, finding points of convergence between the imaginary world of the cycle and the real world in which the audience finds themselves, and finding stories that can be told without spoken or sung text.

I make music because of the people I get to work with when making it, so I always aim to empower performers to bring as much of themselves to a performance of my work as possible, and for the simplest and most direct way of expressing musical and narrative ideas.

Main image: Prospect Cottage, Dungeness by Geoff King

Bio

Geoffrey King is an American composer living in London. Influenced by metamodernism and camp aesthetics, he always aims for clarity of concept, directness of expression and disarming straightforwardness to heighten the experience of new music by including documentary and performative elements. He has worked with many soloists and ensembles in the UK and the US and co-directs the composer collective Stomping Ground.

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