The nineteenth-century Lied occupied a paradoxical position for women composers. On one hand, it functioned as an oasis: songs could be written and performed in drawing rooms and salons, where women’s musical activity was socially sanctioned. On the other hand, the song cycle—a monumental form of this miniature genre—remained largely inaccessible. Although Lieder were considered an appropriate vehicle for female composers, women produced relatively few extended cycles. Small collections of songs by women appeared with some frequency, but large-scale cycles were rare, especially before the later nineteenth century. As a result, the composers who helped define the expressive possibilities of the Lied were seldom able to shape its grandest form.

My presentation asks how curation might respond to this historical exclusion. Drawing on discussions of nineteenth-century “song bouquets” assembled from preexisting songs, as well as art-historical work that frames curators as auteurs and agents of change, I argue that curating song cycles from individual songs by women offers performers programmable repertoire that would otherwise be difficult to find. More importantly, it grants composers belated access to a genre from which they were historically excluded. Curation, in this sense, can be a form of advocacy. It can also be a form of analysis, if we understand analysis as a practice allied with composition and performance.

I develop this argument via a discussion of Liebesblätter, a cycle I assembled from eight songs by the German singer/composer Pauline Decker. Although Decker published nearly thirty Lieder, they appeared almost exclusively as single songs, and she never composed a cycle. I show how recurring poetic themes and expressive gestures across her song output invite cyclic hearing, and how these latent connections can be activated through curatorial decisions. I conclude by considering the broader implications of curated cycles for analysis and performance. These projects encourage us to see the song cycle not as a fixed compositional object but, in keeping with its historical origins, as a flexible set of fragments. More broadly, they suggest how analytical practices can respond to histories of exclusion by creating new listening pathways into underrepresented repertoires.

This project investigates how György Kurtág’s song from his Op. 35a engages with the poetic layout and modernist fragmentary aesthetics of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem “Im Walde.” Departing from conventional text–music relationships grounded in semantic illustration or motivic representation, the study instead focuses on the poem’s material and spatial organization—specifically its vertically constrained manuscript layout—and examines how this visual configuration informs Kurtág’s musical thinking. In Hölderlin’s manuscript, the poem unfolds in a narrow vertical strip along the page margin, disrupting linear stanzaic continuity and foregrounding a spatialized experience of poetic form. Literary scholars have interpreted this layout as emblematic of a boundary between nature and culture, with language itself functioning as both a generative and destabilizing force.

Building on this interpretation, my findings argue that Hölderlin’s poem articulates a conception of fragmentarity not as mere incompleteness or aphoristic brevity, but as a structural condition produced by recursive processes, boundary formation, and arrested continuation. Language in “Im Walde” repeatedly oscillates between creation and deconstruction, disappearance and return, forming a looping rather than teleological progression. This model of fragmentarity provides a conceptual framework for rethinking Kurtág’s engagement with the poem.

My analysis proposes that Kurtág’s song reflects this poetic logic through musical processes that lend themselves to vertical alignment across time—that is, the stacking of recuring motivic and intervallic transformations that are temporally dispersed. Rather than unfolding as a goal-directed narrative, musical materials recur through cycles of transformation and recontexualization that resist completion. Fragmentarity thus emerges from contrained repetion and suspended return, forming a musical analogue to Hölderlin’s vertical layout. Crucially, my analysis frames this relationship not as a claim about compositional intent, but as an analytical projection that reads Kurtág’s music emblematically alongside Hölderlin’s manuscript practice. By aligning poetic verticality with musical process, the study contributes to broader discussions of modernist fragmentarity in postwar composition and offers a new perspective on Kurtág’s aesthetic of restraint, interruption, and formal openness.

The concept album calls to mind opulent art rock of the 1960s and 1970s, but narratively and thematically linked concept albums have been produced by artists in innumerable genres. Certain genres such as punk have had an aversion to the excesses of the concept album, especially the hardcore punk scene of the 1980s which favored aggression and brevity over the compositional virtuosity and emotional range associated with concept albums. With the advent of other punk subgenres such as post-hardcore and emo, the expansion of emotional expression led a variety of indie and commercial punk acts to explore the album in new and creative ways. As a case study, I explore one of these post-hardcore acts, the band Cursive from Omaha, Nebraska, and specifically their concept album The Ugly Organ (2003). The analysis relates the album structure to Syd Field’s treatment of three-act narrative film structure, and explores the ways in which musical and narrative beats connect over large timespans on the record. I show the ways in which conceptual treatment can work even in genres such as punk, and how they intersect with and maintain contact with progenitors, while allowing for greater long-form construction at the album level. In addition to the discussion of The Ugly Organ I also layout a larger framework for understanding the concept album and its various types on an interlocking spectrum from more narrative to less narrative, as well as the intersection of other features such as associated multimedia, album artwork, and intertextual considerations.