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.

Converging interests / Jeepers creepers

My two main interests are in prosody and in the musical setting of texts.  Actually, these are the same interest, but stretching out with two diverging paths.  

***

Jeeper creepers where'd you get those peepers / jeepers creepers where'd you get those eyes

If you listen to that song you will find beat one of the eight-measure phrase like this:

Jeepers 

creepers 

where'd you get those 

peepers 

Jeepers 

creepers 

where'd you get those 

eyes

But the one can be displaced by a half beat, coming on the AND of ONE.  That's what happens in the third and seven measures here. The singer might also phrase it so that the accent doesn't fall exactly on the one, in the second measure, for example.  

The poetic meter is trochaic: you can see that if you find the secondary stress on the word get.  

Jeepers Creepers (Remastered 1998)

There is no enjambment in song

 I  had a significant idea last night: there is no enjambment in song. 

With the necessary qualifications. In other words, the syntactic phrase does not continue into another musical phrase (in the normal course of events). When it does, I perceive it as a mistake, or as something jarring, at the very least.  See this version of Claudio poems "Siempre será mi amigo..."  He just stops at the end of a line and awkwardly starts again, with no sense of the continuity of the syntax.  "verdadera ... amistad."  True / friendship. In spoken recitation, this would require a very brief pause, if anything.  

So instead of saying "there is no enjambment" you might say, "there shouldn't be enjambment" in song. Of  course, that is assuming one wants a decently defensible prosody in text setting. 

***

On of the most insightful things I've read on musical prosody (the pairing of music and words) is by Sondheim, in the introduction to his collected lyrics. Not because I share his opinions, or even like, particularly, his songs, but because he has worked out a philosophy of what he wants to do, what works and doesn't, with admirable clarity. You can see his perspective immediately, and he speaks authoritatively. It provides a jumping off point for any other ideas one might have. 

Hemingway died when he was 61, I am 64.

 

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.   

  

Dialect coach

Theories of the vernacular won't be written in the vernacular, typically (Dante.) Vernacular and demotic are not words that belong to that category. That is is not even a paradox, however.  To even recognize the vernacular you have to stand outside of that category. I think of The Sopranos and how Gandolfini had a dialect coach, even though he himself was from NJ.