Debussy's "Martyr": A Poisoned Arrow
On last week's VoiceBox, composer and blogger Brian Rosen and I explored the theme of "badness" in vocal music. You can read Brian's accompanying blog post on the broadcast here.Towards the end of the show, we talked about songs that possess many of the qualities shared by sub-par efforts and yet somehow transcend things like inane lyrics, wavering intonation, a dirge-like melody and inept musical instrument mastery …