Music Repertoire - Performance Study 455: Vocal Literature  

At the Conservatory by James Ensor, 1902. Making fun of Wagner.
(Courtesy of ARTstor)

Familiarity with the breadth of classical vocal literature

As part of the course, you will create program notes, about a page of double spaced for 10 minutes of music, and give a sung presentation at the end of the term.

The reference area in the Mudd has two books on writing about music:

• Cowdery, James R. How to Write About Music: The RILM Manual of Style
  Reference Collection, ML3797 .H69 2006
  This is a style manual concerned with the proper form of names of movements, keys, people's names, spelling, capitalization, citing, and some examples of good writing.
• Holoman, Kern. Writing About Music: A Style Sheet
  Reference Collection, ML3797 .W75 2008
  This is a similar manual, but does have a section on writing program notes.

Im LUCIA a Subject begins with... search using a composer's last name will get books about that person, but this will result in many books for a lot of composers. For books specifically relating to vocal music, do a Subject Keyword search for "songs" or the title of the work along with the composer's name.
Example: Subject Keyword songs faure
Example: Subject Keyword wolf morike

If you need more information, go to RILM, the index to scholarly periodical literature.