Floating phrasing

 In this particular style of phrasing, we can still feel the 1 and 3 musically, and the strong syllables that ought to fall on those musical beats. The overall sense of phrasing, though, is fluid: the phrasing floats above the metrical beats, and the accents can be anticipated or delayed, or otherwise displaced.  There is a kind of "stretchiness" there. Sinatra does this, and Lester Young, for example, as an instrumental example.  (I dislike it, in Sinatra, when it becomes a mannerism.). 

The result of this is a conversational tone, a  more flexible speech rhythm superimposed on a 4/4 beat, without being subjected to it. The brilliance of it is that the musical rhythm no longer forces the speech rhythm into a Crustacean* bed.  

___

*Not the word I need, but "Proctrustrean" is too hard for me to spell right now. 

"September Song" by Sarah Vaughan. 

Exceptions to the prosodic rules

 Suppose there is an exception to the rule that strong metrical beats will fall on beats 1 or 3.  

For example, I found in a Taylor Swift song a phrase in which there is a strong beat on 1 2 3 4 of a single measure. Or you could anticipate a beat, singing it on the and of 4 of the previous measure, or delay an emphasis to later in the measure.  

A subsidiary of this rule would be that breaking it involves syncopation or a special kind of phrasing.  The breaking of the rule is felt to be different. In practice, where the accent fall is more fluid, but that does not prevent 1 and 3 from being the strong beats in principle.  

I'm not quite sure what to do with the practice of certain vernaculars in which the 2 and 4 receive emphasis.  For example, you don't clap your hand of snap your fingers on 1 and 3 in gospel or jazz. A jazz player will set a metronome, but treat that as a hi hat, on 2 and 4, not as a downbeat.  

 I would say that they are still the 2 and 4: otherwise they would just be the 1 and 3!  

enjambment in Lorca: a hypothesis

 Here's my hypothesis.  Lorca is a poet attuned to song, and there is no enjambment in song. He will enjamb, but not in a way that affects the (hypothetical) musical phrase. In this example, the enjambments occur between stanzas, and each stanza is a phrase.  Leaving aside the refrain, we have rhyme with the last words of each stanza, first volver, amanecer, ayer, and then retornar, manantial, mar.  The enjambment is emphatic, but doesn't interfere with the intonational phrase.  Groups of two or three lines form single phrases.  Stanzas of four are binary, with two groups of two.  

    Yo vuelvo

    por mis alas.

    

¡Dejadme volver!

¡Quiero morirme siendo

amanecer!

    Yo vuelvo 

    por mis alas.

¡Quiero morirme siendo

ayer!

    Yo vuelvo 

    por mis alas.

¡Dejadme retornar!

Quiero morirme siendo

manantial.

Quiero morirme fuera

de la mar. 

3 rules of musical prosody

 1. Strong syllables fall on beats 1 or 3.  [Generally, linguistic and musical beats are aligned.] 

2. No enjambment! [Generally, linguistic and musical phrases are aligned.]

3. Melodic contours (shapes, up and down movements) line up with the phrasing of the line.  

The rules can be broken, but... breaking the rules produces tension or awkwardness. Not breaking the rule is (almost) never noticeable. I don't take it as breaking the rule if the strong syllable anticipates the 1 of the measure by an 8th note or less. But the listener might feel some tension.  That tension is built into the genre, in the case of jazz, where you are supposed to anticipate or delay a bit.  

The music of the music is stronger, takes precedence, over the music of the poetry, which can be more subtle and varied. It can seem to destroy the text, then. But the revenge of the poem occurs when the listener gets irritated if the poem is stretched too far out of whack.  You can override my rhythm, says the poem, but you will pay for it.  

When I set some Niedecker poems, I followed the rhythms and contours of the poem as much as I could, but I noticed a flaw, that I set the word "cranberry" as CRAN-be-REE instead of CRAN-BE-rry.  

 

Tracing another song

The original text is called "Serenata," and occurs in Lorca's book Canciones.  He took the poem and changed it a bit to include it in a play, Los amores de don Perlimplín y Belisa en su jardín.  Lolita becomes Belisa.  There is tune associated with it, probably composed by Lorca himself.  

Billy Strayhorn also set it to music for a production of LADDPYBESJ.  He doesn't use Lorca's melody, but another one of his own invention, but the melodies have a similar shape or contour, in their rises and falls.  

Here are some relevant videos:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rhjnYjKckQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoA40wQgJ58

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcA6I8vWx8Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhiT__Zjmhw&t=51s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTHJ77bOcnY

Tracing a song (or 2)

 There is a song called "El vito." There is another called "Anda jaleo."  Lorca recorded the latter with La Argentinita in 1931.  "Anda jaleo," though not written by him, is associated with him, like the other 9 songs he recorded, and a few others he did not record but have become attached to the canon of Lorca songs.  

"El quinto regimiento" is a Spanish civil war song that begins with the melody of "El vito," using that song as the verse, and the "Anda jaleo" song as the chorus. The words are now "venga jaleo," rhyming with "Franco se va de paseo." 

The fifth regiment song was sung by American folk singers. It tells of the founding of the fifth regiment in Madrid at the beginning of the civil war.  There are two versions of the lyric, one saying "el pueblo madrileño / fundó el quinto regimiento," the other saying "el partido comunista." 

Coltrane using "El vito" as the basis of "Olé Coltrane."  A Colombian born choreographer did a ballet called "Las desamoradas" using Coltrane's "Olé" and the plot of La casa de Bernarda Alba, by Lorca. 

***

I could do a similar genealogy with other songs. "Despierte la novia" from Bodas de sangre, for example. 

Another would be "The Flowers die of love" from Don Perlimplín.  Here there are two melodies, one by Lorca himself, and the other by Billy Strayhorn.  

What if

 What if the course itself were the destination, and not a step toward some published research, indefinitely deferred? There is more that I can do by teaching the material than by publishing small fragments of it here or there, where maybe nobody will pay it much heed. 

Messiah

I'm singing Messiah tonight as part of the fact/staff choir.  It should be a nice concert.  We have a chamber orchestra and soloists from the voice faculty. Yesterday I went to Vespers, an almost 2 hour concert of holiday music.  

Anyway, at rehearsal I was taking conscious note of the fact that strong metrical beats in the text fall on the 1 or the 3 of the musical measures. This is a banal fact of text setting, so well known that few people even take the time to articulate it. I would say this: everyone would notice an instance in which this rule was not followed. It would sound wrong and jarring.  It would, in fact, be like accenting the wrong syllables while speaking.  

"O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion"  That one's in 3/4 time.  The emboldened syllables fall on the 1.   A lot of the libretto is from Isaiah, with a bit of Luke and Malachi thrown in.  The language doesn't have to be metrical: you can just squeeze the unstressed syllables between the strong beat however you want.   Another kind of obvious thing: you don't need a lot of words. The entire libretto is a few pages long, though the piece would last 3 hours (?). (We are only doing part 1). Mostly, we just repeat the lines over and over again.  Vocal music doesn't have to be wordy. **** I was also listening to some social poetry sung by Paco Ibáñez.  "La poesía es un arma cargada de futuro."  Some of it is super awkward to sing.  "Maldigo la poesía concebida como un lujo cultural por los neutrales."  Ouch.  It's bad poetry in the first place, and it also isn't "cantabile."  The songwriter hasn't constructed a very tuneful melody for it, but uses a kind of lilting, up and down, recitative style.  You can sing prose (Isaiah) but not prosaic poetry of this sort. It's the tone, the string of 3 or 4 unaccented syllables that are difficult to cram in between the beats, the passive voice, the crudity of the sentiment, the Marxist jargon.  "I curse poetry conceived of as a cultural luxury by the neutral ones."   *** So the rules of vocal setting so far:  alignment of beats / no enjambment / wordiness is awkward: a little text goes a long way.  Now I realize why I am a bad lyricist:  I was trying to write words to melodies with a lot of notes.

The song course

 What do I need to do to get ready for this new song course?

First I should write this blog post. This post will show how much work I've done already, even though I feel I'm at the very beginning of the planning process. One thing I did was to make the poster.   

See how many students are enrolled (18!). Some have studied with me in the past.  

Subscribe to Spotify premium.  Create a playlist for the course (empty so far!). I want to make sure the playlist is not too intimidating. Figure out how to search for profiles.  

Check academic calendar:  classes begin Jan. 21. End, May 8.  (Spring break week of March 17.)

Think about guest speakers?  

The overall shape of the course is in my mind, but vaguely.  

Think about musical survey for students:

                      Do you play / sing / read music? (Instruments).  

                       Favorite genres, composers, songwriters, performers. 

                        What else should I ask them?  Open ended question.  

I should create a folder on my desktop of laptop to include everything in the course.  (Done!)  

Found a document I had started a month ago, called "song course plan."

 Background

 

Antecedents:  

French Song  

Folk music movements. 

 

Falla [classical lieder] 

 

Theoretical

Layers of interpretation

Adaptation studies 

Elements of music 

Prosody!  

 

Rubrics

 

             How to listen to a song.  

Rúbrica para escuchar una “canción de autor”

 

La canción es “the sole example of one preexisting art form being imposed upon another. The words of the poem are not adapted, like film scenarios from plays; they remain unaltered while being tampered with” (Ned Rorem, Settling the Score 293). [Not entirely true… you could make a comic book of a poem and keep all the words of the original poem, or use a piece of music as a score for a ballet, without changing anything]. 

 

I. El texto original. ¿De quién es? Analizar el texto como poema. 

 

El poeta / la poeta: resonancia cultural del texto 

Ritmo y versificación / elementos musicales implícitos / explícitos en el texto

 

II. La música. 

 

Estilo y género. Época. Instrumentación. Elementos musicales (rítmicos, melódicos…). Características afectivas (emociones). 

 

III. La relación entre texto y música. 

 

La canción es una interpretación del poema, es decir: nos lleva a percibir el mensaje del poema de un modo determinado. ¿Cuáles son las preguntas que tenemos que formular para juzgar esta interpretación?  

 

1. Emociones de la melodía / instrumentación / ritmo 

 

2. Preeminencia [relativa] de la música y la letra 

 

3. Comparación con otras canciones con letras del mismo poeta. Conexiones reales con el autor original  

 

4. El énfasis en ciertos versos…  

 

5. El contexto de la recepción. El público. 

 

6. Reacciones personales… [me gusta porque /no me gusta porque ]

 

*7. El propósito de la canción. [canción de amor / canción política / homenaje al poeta] 

 

Poets

 

Góngora

Rosalía de Castro

Machado

Lorca

Hernandez

Goytisolo

Valente?

[Neruda?] 

 

Singer-songwriters 

G. Montero

Serrat

Prada

Ibáñez

 

Flamenco 

Camarón

Linares  

Morente

Poveda

Rosalía

 

Projects

 

Songs

Critical essays

Visual projects for those who don't like to write about music.  

Podcast / playlist 

***

What are the basic elements of creating a song from a text? Probably I would say things like this:

An accented syllable will fall on a strong beat in the music (typically).  The song I am listening to at this exact moment has this line:  "I can ONly give you COUNtry walks in SPRINGtime." The capitalized syllables all fall on beat 1.  I bet you can see where the 3 is?  What happens when the metrical accent is displaced?  

This is an obvious example of something everyone knows already even if they don't know they know it. 

What else? Musical phrases are equivalent to lines or stanzas of poetry. There is a general alignment principle.