Happy, Sad and Everything In Between
The metamodern songs of Francesca Fargion
Preface
Strike the iron while it’s hot is my favourite bit of common wisdom, if by common wisdom we mean words that justify almost anything. Resuscitating the corpse of an unpublished text when everything else has moved on—the seasons, the thoughts, the writing—can be excruciating. Yet sometimes, unexpected forces intervene that simply can’t be outmanoeuvred—and here we are.
I’m delighted to finally present my analysis of Francesca Fargion’s music, which grew out of a conversation we had almost two years ago. While I’ve always found her work touching and funny, at some point it struck me that it also holds remarkable potential for theoretical analysis. Her style—marked by subtle depictions of shifting emotions, millennial anxieties and hints of absurdist humour—embodies, to me, one of the most distilled expressions of metamodern sensibility in contemporary composition, a sensibility that offers one possible response to the postmodern.
In September 2025, I revisited the essay when presenting a paper at the RMA Conference titled The British School of Emotionalism and Metamodernism: Towards a New Expressive Paradigm in Contemporary Music, which explored emerging aesthetics in the work of young UK composers Robin Haigh and Francesca Fargion through the lens of metamodern theory. Although I have recently grown more critical of metamodernism—shifting into post-metamodern territory, if you like—I have chosen to publish this essay as a testament to my ongoing fondness for Francesca’s music, which dates back to our undergraduate course at Goldsmiths, University of London (bonus picture at the end!). My thanks go to Greg Dember and Linda Ceriello for their valuable feedback.
The essay begins with an introduction to the composer and her background, before turning to her song cycle Dear Luna and examining its relationship to Romanticism and metamodern aesthetics, such as the emphasis on felt experience and the restless oscillation between melancholy and playfulness, sincerity and irony.
The Poetics of the Mundane
Meet Francesca Fargion, a London-based composer-performer in her early thirties who loves writing and performing her own songs. Simple, dreamlike and tenderly absurd, her works are not merely emotional; they take emotion itself—and the confusion that so often surrounds it—as their subject and infuse it with heightened theatricality. Sometimes she appears alone on stage, at other times she is joined by larger ensembles. She is also one half of The Fargions, the duo she formed with her brother Giacomo.
“Writing songs is the most natural thing for somebody who sings, but I also like the short form of it. I enjoy writing words and creating things that are self-contained, like songs about one particular little world,” she told me in 2024. This self-contained quality is often echoed in the sharp specificity of her titles: Never Let Go of Your Sighs, John Has a Headache (for headache with shivering fits) and The Bookstore in Las Vegas. Fargion’s instinct is to seek emotional resonance not in grand gestures but in the overlooked, intimate textures of everyday life. Full of understated melodrama, these pieces elevate the poetics of the mundane—the evanescent, banal everyday.
Another notable feature of Fargion’s musical storytelling is her turn to the autobiographical and documentary, drawing directly on personal source materials that form the core of her works rather than serving merely as inspiration. Diary Songs sets to music diary entries she wrote at the age of twelve, while Together with the rest recounts her Italian grandparents’ immigration to the UK, using sentences and the intonations of their recorded speech.
The arts have seemingly adopted this recourse to the autobiographical and documentary over the past decades: in a world saturated with fake news and cynicism, what feels increasingly trustworthy is the tangible—one’s own sensations, one’s material presence in the world, however mundane. Telling stories grounded in lived experience, using the first person and eschewing narrative mediation, offers a way out of this conundrum. Yet, as Anna Kornbluh warns in Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, we should be cautious about embracing the frictionless and the immediate too readily.
This emphasis on lived experience and direct expression finds a clear parallel in Fargion’s work, where song cycles have been a linchpin since her debut albums Circe Songs and 3 Romantic Songs, both released in 2020. One might assume that writing tunes about emotions, heartbreak and other concerns of the heart is nowadays the domain of pop musicians alone. After all, Fargion—a classically trained composer and pianist—openly prefers “writing music with text over purely instrumental works.” So where does this near-exclusive attachment to the song form come from?
“As you know, I’ve always had such an interest in the Romantic period and lieder,” she recalled, prompting me to think back to our undergraduate course at Goldsmiths, where she often rehearsed Schubert and Schumann for her piano exams. Her fascination with the lieder tradition was first sparked by her father, composer Matteo Fargion, who introduced her to Schubert’s Nachtstück when she was around 17. That moment led her to explore more of Schubert’s songs and eventually to fall in love with Schumann. It was their music—two pinnacles of German Romanticism—that left the strongest imprint on her. “Many songs I’ve composed use lieder as a starting point,” Fargion noted.
Yet what she creates is not a mere homage to Romanticism but a reworking of its emotional and formal vocabulary—prompting the question of how Romanticism, metamodernism and Fargion’s style intersect.
Dear Luna and the Naively Romantic
Written in 2024 for chamber ensemble, choir and singing pianist, Dear Luna may be Fargion’s most characteristic song cycle to date. In just under half an hour, its fourteen tracks (including one instrumental interlude) take us on a kaleidoscopic journey through themes of nature, parental relationships and exaggerated sentimentality, while musing on what it’s like to be “naked” and “delicious.” Its emotional landscape oscillates between wistful melancholy, uplifting joy and moments of carefree serenity.
The work also adheres to the composer’s signature style, being firmly rooted in tonality and avoiding harsh dissonances that might tear its delicate fabric. The singing is sweet, either supported by the busy textures of the ensemble and choir or carried by Fargion’s lone voice and piano. While the cycle does not radically bend the conventions of traditional song form, there are no verses or choruses in the usual sense, and the songs remain short, often framed by intros, outros and instrumental interludes.
The premiere of Dear Luna took place on 7 June 2024 at Snape Maltings Concert Hall during the Aldeburgh Festival, where Fargion was a participant in the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme. The performance featured The House of Bedlam (Stephanie Tress on cello, Kathryn Williams on flute, Carl Raven on clarinet/saxophone), violinist Angharad Davies, Aldeburgh Voices and a local choir, with Fargion herself as a singing pianist.
Given Fargion’s love for the Romantic period, it is unsurprising that the cycle’s text loosely draws on Goethe’s short poem An den Mond—a work also set to music by Schubert in his namesake lied. The introductory notes to the video reveal its intent with striking clarity:
The songs are naively Romantic, retaining themes of the original—with close connection to the natural world, tragedy and love—but spoken in a more direct, simple tone. I wanted each song to retain a kind of ambiguity, as if you’re peering into a window and witnessing fragments of something without knowing all the information.
Here, “naively Romantic,” “more direct, simple tone” and “retain a kind of ambiguity” already point to core metamodern traits—simplicity, oscillation and directedness—and to their interweaving, even before we hear the music. The overt reference to Romanticism is telling, as its strong ties with metamodernism were noted early on. In the abstract of their seminal 2010 essay Notes on Metamodernism, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker write that “the metamodern is most clearly, yet not exclusively, expressed by the neoromantic turn of late...”
Crucially, it is the words “not exclusively” in the quote above that merit attention. As metamodern works of art have continued to emerge since the term’s popularisation in 2010, it has become increasingly clear that their engagement with Romantic tropes and sensibilities—such as an interest in nature, national identity or the occult—varies considerably. Nor is the presence of these themes a prerequisite for a work to be considered metamodern.
Another complicating factor is that Romanticism in music, like in literature and the fine arts, was not merely a sensibility but a structured movement with its own harmonic language, forms and genres. While some Romantic echoes—for instance, the use of tonal materials and an emphasis on lyrical melody—can be found in compositions that might be considered metamodern, equating its musical dimension with Romanticism feels too narrow. With little historical distance, there is still much work to be done in determining whether musical metamodernism can be associated with particular styles or compositional techniques, or whether it should be understood as an overarching aesthetic sensibility.
“Am I overflowing with anger or am I just warm?”
In any case, Dear Luna’s parallel alignment with Romanticism cannot be denied. That said, the song cycle still feels more like a 21st-century indie-pop album than a 19th-century collection of art songs. In our conversation, Fargion spoke of her love for the Beatles, another formative influence during her teenage years. Alongside the lieder tradition, the rock band left a profound imprint on her writing and deepened her fascination with the song form. There’s something that instantly connects Dear Luna to the recognisable blend of vivid storytelling, witty irony and childlike absurdity found, for instance, in Piggies—a track from The White Album, one of Fargion’s favourite Beatles records.
To better understand how metamodern aesthetics manifest in Dear Luna, let’s examine some of the songs. Since the cycle naturally falls into three thematic categories—nature and seasons, human emotions, and parental relationships—it makes sense to explore them one by one. The opening song, Fill the Valleys, establishes the pastoral setting through Fargion’s melismatic, repetitive singing—which flows like a river—accompanied by the call and response of the choir, a motif that recurs throughout the cycle. The choir’s role is particularly intriguing: while traditionally divided into multiple registers, it almost always sings as a single voice in Dear Luna. Reminiscent of a Greek chorus, yet functioning in a more introspective way, it seems to act as the narrator’s inner voice—commenting, reinforcing or contending with her thoughts. Anyway, May continues the pastoral atmosphere with a hazy, Beatlesque quality, while Rush River, full of propelling arpeggios and relentless energy, is an earworm that lingers for days. These songs are strikingly direct and immediate, with no trace of hidden irony or ambiguity. In keeping with the best traditions of Romanticism, they simply invite us to reconnect with nature.
The gradual shift from pastoral immediacy to emotional ambiguity begins with the third song, I will never be happy, and continues in welcome to the world. The latter opens with grand, fanfare-like chords, setting the stage for the composer’s absurdist lyricism: “congratulations to the world unless you hate it let’s have a party.” Particularly effective is her near-ubiquitous breaking of prosody—the natural rhythm, stress and intonation of language. This disruption creates a self-aware sense that something is off—a “metamodern uncanny valley,” to borrow Zygmund de Somogyi’s term, originally applied to Robin Haigh’s minute microtonal variations in his AESOP 2. The surreal takes a further turn in I am naked, where the composer muses on what it means to be “naked” and “delicious,” with the choir engaging in a playful, zany dialogue between the two—one has to wonder just how much Goethe remains at this point. Here, Fargion’s quirky humour exemplifies a distinctly millennial take on irony—one that is knowing yet sincere, detached yet deeply felt.
Let’s briefly remind ourselves of an important aesthetic context: contemporary classical—or new music, or whatever label we choose—is still often perceived as a realm of highly calculated structures, rigorous design and meticulous complexity. While Fargion’s songs are undoubtedly structured and intentional, they stand in stark contrast to this perception inherited via modernism from Romanticism. They embrace simplicity, directness and sincerity; they rely on straightforward harmonic progressions and catchy melodies; and they engage with seemingly trivial subjects without the pretense of being more than what they claim to be. Yet they weave a rich tapestry—one that I personally find very relatable and lifelike—that remains captivating from start to finish. Fargion’s music relentlessly oscillates between the seemingly naïve and the profoundly affecting, between surface and depth, irony and honesty. It does not shy away from sentimentality, but neither does it succumb to it—it walks the tightrope between feeling and self-awareness with striking poise.
The good news is: she is not alone in that. While not an established movement, certain trends in contemporary British music suggest a distinct engagement with emotional expression and metamodern aesthetics. Recognising this, I have half-jokingly—though not without critical intent—dubbed this tendency the British School of Emotionalism and Metamodernism (BSEM), to which Fargion would surely be a welcome member. In that case, her balladic My Heart could serve as the group’s official anthem. With its perpetual motion—rooted in the circle progression, a harmonic technique popular in the Baroque era and later influential in 90s pop music—the song creates an inescapable atmosphere of sorrow. The alternating words “happy” and “sad,” sung by Fargion and the choir, seem tailor-made for BSEM’s coat of arms. Folkish and ornamented, Never let go out your sighs meanders gracefully before posing the ultimate metamodern question: “Am I overflowing with anger or am I just warm?”
One of millennials’ most beloved themes—parental relationships—is explored in the songs My Parents and Papa. Yet, rather than leaning into the ubiquitous trope of intergenerational trauma—a staple of some metamodern works such as Everything Everywhere All at Once and BoJack Horseman—Fargion approaches the subject with nuance. My Parents reflects on parental guidance with lines like “my parents always told me to calm down and to pay attention look at friendly faces and don’t worry about your future,” followed by, “and I agree with my parents their point of view is always gentle and they’re cautious in a good way they never worry about their future…” The tone here is intriguingly ambiguous: is the narrator sincere in her agreement or perhaps there’s a subtle undercurrent of irony aimed at this idyllic stance? By contrast, Papa leans unmistakably toward poignancy and seriousness, with its haunting refrain: “Papa, keep your eyes open.”
Afterword
It is worth noting that Dear Luna is far from the only one of Fargion’s works that invites a metamodern reading. Together with the rest offers an even more salient display of ironesty—“the braiding together of irony and sincerity (honesty) in a unified aesthetic expression,” as Greg Dember puts it. Further connections between metamodernism and compositional techniques emerge in 8 songs, where, for instance, the jarring piano accompaniment in the opening piece—contrasting sharply with Fargion’s vocals—would make an excellent case study for Zygmund de Somogyi’s aforementioned metamodern uncanny valley. Her songs also exemplify many of the so-called metamodern strategies outlined by Dember in After Postmodernism: Eleven Metamodern Methods in the Arts.
Yet wherever we look, we encounter a striking oscillation between melancholy and playfulness, sincerity and irony. As Dear Luna demonstrates, Fargion’s approach to song-writing transcends the pretensions of both modernism and postmodernism, offering instead a refreshing embrace of emotional immediacy and vulnerability, articulated through her own distinctive musical techniques and stylistic choices. By singing stories that verge on the absurd, she allows the listener to approach the music with a healthy dose of irony, yet connect with it on a deeper, more sincere level. The music adopts seemingly contradictory inner states, inviting us into a space where Romanticism is reinterpreted for the 21st century. It simultaneously acknowledges and subverts its rules, creating something that feels acutely relevant to our cultural and sociopolitical predicament.
