Part Two

If music is easier to write than words, then if you are trying to write a song then you will often be in that uncomfortable position of having to reverse the more natural order.  In other words, you will often come up with the melody first.

When trying to set a text, I have found that I follow a solution that the text suggests to me. The text is a stimulus and constraint (which is actually easier than composing a melody from scratch.)

A lyric I write after a melody will always sound banal to me.


I saw a girl and she smiled at me
She said her name was Natalie
We shared some laughs and a bottle of wine
I thought that she should be all mine

That's one of the better ones, at least it has the elements of storytelling in a concise way.

In a way it would be a lot to expect, for me to have that skill without working to develop it as much as I work to master piano playing and writing original melodies with their harmonizations. Even though I am a poet the writing of song lyrics is a substantially different skill set, given the type of poet I am.

So I would need to write a different sort of poem, meant as a song lyric in the first place.

Words first, then music

Even though there are counter-cases, the normal order is words first, then music, even in vernacular genres. Though the tendency in the vernacular is to not worry so much about the priority, or to think of the music and words as simultaneously arising, or with a smaller temporal gap, the words tend to precede the musical setting of them.

For example, there is not a tradition of poets finding musical melodies and then trying to write words to them.

I guess you could write new verses to an existing song, adding lyrical material. A translation of a song lyric would have to match the melody note for note, syllable by syllables, if it were being sung to the same tune.

It's not that music or words are easier to write. That would depend on who was doing it and what the standard of being a good or bad melody or set of lyrics was. But all other things being equal, it is easier to set a text to music than write words to existing music.

Of course, when I sat it is hard, that is meaningless, because I could easily think of a phrase or two that fits the melody of Ode to Joy:

We have time to finish dinner

Then we'll watch a Netflix show... 

Or Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring

We'll have some dinner then shopping and zen meditation we'll live out our lives in a state of perpetual motion and stillness and never will darkness become our condition we'll never say never to all the great life possibilities facing us now 

The trick is to get from the dummy lyric to a real one.

Super powers

If you had an invisible car, where would you park it?

Not on the street, where other cars would crash into it

Not even  in your own garage, where you would trip on it



You could only drive it where no other cars were,

no children to cross the road looking both ways

so who would you be invisible from?



If you were invisible who would fall in love with you?

If you were stronger than all you would win the weight-lifting contest

but wouldn't it be cheating?

Concert

I went to a percussion concert last night. It was a solo performance by Colleen Bernstein. I liked her Bach cello suite playing on the marimba.  Bach works well for any instrument. She also played some Debussy and then some Debussy-ish things on vibes. The second part was more didactic, with a project she call "Strength and sensitivity," with percussion + spoken word. She played a march on snare drum while projecting inspirational feminist quotes on a screen. She read some poems and played music that went along with them, or was paired with them. As might be expected, the spoken word / poetry part of the pairing was not all that impressive.  She doesn't have a great poetic sensibility, so the result came off as too didactic / content driven (for me). Her playing is very good, and the spirit behind the project is idealistic. The project might develop into something more interesting, but that would involve using words in a more interesting, maybe musical way, not for their content alone.

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We think that to work on music, we have to have a great musical erudition, but people work on literature all the time without a deep understanding of literature. And I am including people trained in literature in this category.

***

I discovered the work of someone supposedly the leading philosopher of music, Peter Kivy. It is a bit odd. He takes the position that we listen to music for the music itself, not a fashionable position at all. He makes some good points, but there is something a bit off about it.  For example, in a thing on repetition he talks about the repeat sign, but doesn't consider that music is repetitive even within a section that is then repeated. Of course, the meter of a piece does not count as a repetition, though it is, in a sense, and rhythmic patterns are constantly repeated. Motifs are pounded home relentlessly. The point is not the repeat sign, with an entire section being repeated verbatim, but that the entire structural principle of music is repetition. Imagine a piece entirely through-composed: it would be impossible to follow. Now, because of the importance of repetition, we need to counter balance it to avoid monotony. So we derive the next principle of music, which is variation. I'll give you the "same thing," but changed up a bit. If it's not a variation, it will be an elaboration or development, but it has to be a development of the same thing.

But variation is not enough, we need contrast too. But all of this only makes sense if we first think that repetition is the main game in town. Whole sections that are repeated verbatim are not really the main problem to be considered here.

Program Music

The intellectual embarrassment of seeing cadence as "patriarchal" is similar to the embarrassment we feel at "program music." The idea of music imitating storms or battles just seems hokey, cartoonish.

I have listened many times to Duke Ellington's Shakespeare suite, "Such Sweet Thunder." I still cannot identify which piece of music from the "Sweet" goes with what character.  I'm sure someone could explain it to me, (why this piece of music is about this character) but if you have to explain it...I'm sure I would forget the explanation and go back to my non-programatic listening.  

We know music can mimic a storm, but we feel that is not what music does best. Those effects seem secondary. We have the sounds of nature already, we can tape them and we don't need a musical mimesis of them. Those kind of "sound effects" seem secondary, unnecessary at best, the grounds of a hokey kind of "appreciation."
 

National Poets

Canonical poets set to music are often national poets, in other words the standardly cited representatives of their national literatures: Dante, Shakespeare, Burns, Whitman, Lorca, Goethe. This is partly because of their hypercanonical status.

Song Setting

I found it very difficult to write words for music I had written. I was a bit puzzled by this at one time, but the reason is a very simple one. My melodic lines were rhythmically complex and sometimes long. There were a lot of notes. It is much, much easier to go in the other direction. Unless, of course, you write melodies that already fit a strophic form. When I start with a text, it is easy to find a melodic shape that fits that text. You might think too that there are only 12 notes but thousands of words, so you have too many possibilities for a lyric.