I realize now how I approach song setting. The melody and rhythm have to follow the contours of the prosody. I approach it as a student of the poem's rhythms. The poem has to speak through the musical expression. I've had no luck at writing words to melodies I've already written.
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This has been my approach as well, and it has its pitfalls. In particular I find my melodies sounding too much the same, because I resort to the same musical rhythms and motives to realize the prosody.
I guess that's a problem with me too, even in songs without words. But it seems like Ned Rorem's songs sound similar to each other too. There are worse problems to have.
Mm, I don't know Rorem, certainly not well enough to know whether I'd be content with that standard.
I recently spent some time analyzing "Casta Diva", which is at an extreme of the melismatic style of text-setting, and was (naively) surprised to find that the text is two highly regular quatrains (with shared rhymes). Point being that the source of melodic distinctness is not the text. Put another way, if you want your melodies to be different from one another, you have to commit, in each one, to a distinct melodic idea. Follow the text closely, as you do here, layer it with ornamentation like Bellini -- either way, the text won't generate distinctive musical qualities without help.
I don't melisma much, but I have tendencies. I like descending lines more than ascending ones, and I like the melody note over a chord to be a ninth. I like certain intervals.
I have no problem writing melodies, but I think that there will be "family resemblances" among melodies written by a single person. I wouldn't know how to write a melody uncharacteristic of myself, so to speak.
Also, the first song I wrote has a melody as good as any I've written since. I don't see improvement per se. I can improve in many other things, and luck into a really good melody at times, but I can't steadily improve in melody writing like I do in other aspects of music.
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