Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles: Analytical Pathways Toward Performance presents analyses of fourteen song cycles composed after the turn of the twentieth century, offering "ways into" the musical and poetic structure of each cycle to performers, scholars, and students alike.

Chapter 1: "As if with lightning bolts": The Ombra and Tempesta in Schoenberg's Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (Jessica Narum) / Chapter 2: Georgy Sviridov's Pushkin Romances: Approaches to Interpretation (Lisa Feurzeig and Rachael Gates) / Chapter 3: Poetry, Voice and Resistance in Poulenc's Tel jour telle nuit (Peter Kaminsky) / Chapter 4: Guilt, Deliberation, Affirmation: Britten's The Holy Sonnets of John Donne as Catharsis (Gordon Sly) / Chapter 5: Arnold van Wyk's Van Liefde en Verlatenheid ('Of Love and Forsakenness'): Love and Others in 1950s South Africa (Matildie Thom Wium) / Chapter 6: The Queer Context and Composition of Samuel Barber's Despite and Still (James Sullivan) / Chapter 7: Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin: Nihilism and Transcendence in Late Shostakovich (Michael Chikinda) / Chapter 8: Perceiving Imaginative and Intellectual Oscillation in George Crumb's Apparition (Peter Lea and Julia Bentley) / Chapter 9: Modern and Sentimental Voices in Scott Wheeler's Wasting the Night (Benjamin Binder) / Chapter 10: "Let Me Count the Ways": Nostalgia and Repetition in Libby Larsen's Sonnets from the Portuguese (Cara Stroud) / Chapter 11: Climbing the Mountain: Thoughts on Robert Morris's Cold Mountain Songs (Brian Alegant) / Chapter 12: Portrayals of Incongruity in William Bolcom and Sandra Seaton's From the Diary of Sally Hemings (Michael R. Callahan) / Chapter 13: Longing for a Fragment: Sappho as a Figure of Hope in Paul Sánchez's ¿d¿¿p¿¿¿a (Mike Morey) / Chapter 14: There and Then, Here and Now: Higdon's Civil Words (Laura Dallman)