Acclaimed Worcester-based soprano Mary Mackenzie and Matthew Jaskot present Wild & Tended, a program of art song for soprano & piano.

The art song is a cultivated form — it emerged in the early 19th century, as composers began to set poetry to music in a more deliberate and expressive way, using melody, harmony, and rhythm, to convey the emotional and psychological depth of the text. The 20th century saw significant changes in the genre, with the influence of atonality, serialism, folk music, and popular music.

Art song was born as an intimate genre, written to be performed in people’s homes — music for a room, for a gathered circle of friends, for a voice close enough to hear every detail. It continues to be a vibrant and diverse genre, and this program lives in that tension — between the wild and the tended — tracing the art song from its Romantic roots to music written in our own time.

Program to include works by Clara Schumann, Hugo Wolf, Arnold Schoenberg, Francis Poulenc, John Frantzen and more.