Words & Meaning :: 
Spoken language has features that, through the quality or character of the voice, can convey emotional or intentional cues distinct from the lexical and grammatical aspects of language. Prosodic elements are usually considered to include variations in the pitch, amplitude, and tempo of the speech. Prosodic features include raising the pitch of the voice to express surprise, signal uncertainty, or designate a question; lowering the pitch of the voice to stress significant words or convey seriousness of purpose; increasing the amplitude to signal anger; decreasing the amplitude to suggest intimacy; increasing the tempo to convey excitement; or decreasing the tempo to imply lethargy or depression, etc. Indeed prosody is often called the 'music' of speech.
That the text of a poem might convey more than the words on the page was an important element in a disagreement between T.S. Eliot and Matthew Arnold. Eliot wrote: 'What I call the "auditory imagination" is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense ...' ('Matthew Arnold', in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism; Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England [London, 1933], pp. 118-9). And about Milton, Eliot commented: 'I am not suggesting that Milton had no idea to convey which he regards as important: only that the syntax is determined by the musical significance, by the auditory imagination, rather than by the attempt to follow actual speech or thought' ('Milton I' [1936], in On Poetry and Poets [London, 1957], p. 142). Ezra Pound, who like W. B. Yeats worked with and admired the work of Arnold Dolmetsch and made reference in their own works to his search for the lost art of performing 'early music', believed that the auditory powers of poetic language are elements in intelligence and understanding, rather than lying deeper down below them. Pound believed in 'absolute rhythm' and composition 'in the sequence of the musical phrase' (Literary Essays, e.g. pp. 9, 3), but this was associated more with his ideas on performance. Overall, he preferred to remember Thomas Campion's opinion, expressed in his Observations in the Art of English Poesie [1602] that: 'The eare is a rationall sence and a chiefe judge of proportion' (Campion, Works, ed. W.R. Davis [London, 1969], p. 294). [the paragraph above is a paraphrase of part of http://www.cai.cam.ac.uk/students/study/english/pound/pound7.pdf] |
Music too has ways of representing mood and the successful matching of text to musical line relies to some degree on a matching of cues. One important detail is matching rhythm of the music to the meter of the text. We have already seen how some terms have found their way from poetry into music theory - anacrusis and syncopation, for example.
The stresses in the musical line, identified by the placement of barlines, should match the stresses in the text, called verbal accents. So the phrase "We must speak" might be spoken in three different ways, with the stress on 'We', on 'must' or on 'speak'. By placing the stressed word on the first beat of the bar, that is after a barline '|', the different stress patterns can be made clear. So
Ex. 1: | We must speak; Ex. 2: We | must speak; Ex. 3: We must | speak
Poetry, when set to song, is particularly sensitive to how the music matches the metre of the words. Those seeking to set poetry to music are well advised to look at some of the finest composers of English song such a Henry Purcell or Benjamin Britten or, in the field of popular music, the American song-writers Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Ira and George Gershwin. The musical line should point to, even accentuate, the meaning behind the words and should not obscure it.
The problem with the meaning of words and the structure of the music associated with them, comes to the fore when translating opera, oratorio or song libretti from one language to another. Invariably, the musical line cannot be changed, particularly in a work as complicated as a large opera. The translator has to find new language that 'both' fits the meaning and, to a large extent, the rhythmic structure of the original text and therefore of the unchangeable musical line. For this reason, translations of opera libretti are rarely 'literal'.
References:
Words & Syncopation ::
Verbal accent can also be 'mirrored' in a musical line by placing important words over extended notes which may or may not lie on the strong beats in a bar. If these notes start on beats that, because of the barline structure, are 'weak', the rhythmic effect is called a 'syncopation'. Syncopation can be found in non-vocal music too, where the accents in one line do not correspond to the pattern that in another line matches that identified by the placement of the bar lines. For more detail go to lesson 20
Words & Phrasing ::
We met earlier, in lesson 21, the concept of 'phrase' and 'phrasing' in music, where the music line is broken up into shorter sections that encompass a single idea. Text too, can be structured in the same way - maybe through the individual lines of a poem, or by using commas or other punctuation signs. The way the tension in a musical line relaxes at cadences, or the way the musical flow is stopped or paused at the end of a section - these are both examples of how music can complement the text it accompanies. The effect can be be explicit, in the vocal line itself, or may be implicit in the way the composer alternates accompanied vocal line with purely instrumental passages. Sometimes, one has to draw back from the detail of individual notes on a single vocal line to see how the architecture of the whole score projects the 'meaning' within the text.
Scoring for Voices ::
There aim of any composer of vocal music should be to make the music as easy for the singers to read as possible. For example, each vocal line in a vocal score should be written on a separate line and if voices divide they should also be printed on separate lines for greater clarity. It is difficult enough to have to read both music and words at the same time without having extraneous notes from another musical line on the same stave.
During the twentieth century a 'convention' was adopted to make vocal music much clearer than it had been only a hundred years or so earlier. For example, the breaking up of the musical line so that single unbeamed notes lie above each syllable in the text made the music much more difficult to read. Today, the musical line follows the standard 'conventions' we discussed earlier. Polysyllabic words will be hyphenated and spread out below the musical line to show how each syllable matches the note or notes above. Where two or more notes are sung during a single syllable, known a melisma, the notes may be marked with a 'slur' and a matching horizontal line shown extending from the right of the text lying below the group. A melismatic text setting has several (sometimes many) notes per syllable of text.