Choral Resource

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My advice is this:

1. Spend some quality time with your text. If you are going to set it, you must like something about it. Let it become your ally, not your opponent in this creation of a new work.
2. I would further suggest analyzing your text poetically and trying to break it down into the smallest of understandable thoughts and phrases, just to see the possibilities.
3. The balance between unity and variety in a piece is a personal aesthetic choice, but being mindful of that balance will produce a better piece. When you start to craft the musical phrases and rhythms you are going to use, look for where they might make returns and be developed.
4. It is much easier to expand or contract a musical idea than it is to squish or overly elongate a phrase of text. A musical idea can come back in an infinite variety of ways, but the text is the text: if you stray too far from it’s original form, you will either lose it’s meaning or change it completely.
5. Even in a serious piece, it is good to be playful. Don’t get caught into a rut with meter. Let the text free you a little in that regard. Working with prose can be great for teaching us the beauty of shifting our musical stresses about.

What brought that on? 

I was flipping through the pages of Cooper and Meyer’s The Rhythmic Structure of Music last week and there were a couple of ideas in it that got me thinking about an excellent article, The Text Trap, I read by Kirche Mecham some time ago. They aren’t really about the same thing, but they both overlap on my thinking in regards to the setting of text to music.

The most interesting thing I found in The Rhythmic Structure of Music was the idea of using the various poetical feet to analyze form in music rather than poetry. For reference, here are some of the basic feet used to analyze poetry (s = stressed, u = unstressed):

• iamb = u s
• trochee = s u
• anapest = u u s
• dactyl = - u u
• amphibrach = u s u

The authors take these basic patterns and apply them to rhythm and meter (of course), but then take the thought further and use it as a lens for larger parts of the musical structure. They, however, don’t talk about the seemingly obvious application of these analytic tools to the setting of text to music. I know that was not the focus of their book, but it got me thinking about the things we often take for granted.

I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to a piece by a budding composer, only to hear the text shoe-horned into a musical phrase in which it did not properly fit. The effect goes beyond distracting and makes the piece seem a little ridiculous. My immediate thought is, “They don’t know how to deal with text.”

I don’t know how important it is for a composer to know all the different poetic feet by name (anapest, iamb, etc.), but it is essential that they understand that language is married to rhythm and stress. Language is music on its own, before we add melody and harmony to it. This is generally not a problem for composers when dealing with a traditional sort of poem that is very strict in meter and form. However, it does become a problem in many modern types of poetry and in the setting of prose (scriptures, for example).

Awareness, I believe, is half the battle. It is helpful to speak through a text a few times and get the feel of that text’s natural rhythm and flow. Despite how much you may love a musical idea, you will be less tempted to squish a long phrase of text into it if you have gone through this process of meditating on the text and even going so far as to analyze it poetically. Sentences can be broken down into smaller parts that musically are often easier to work with than complete thoughts. I remember hearing Sondheim quoted once on this issue; he said that if you’re in 4/4 and you have a 3/4 thought, switch to 3/4 even if just for a moment: don’t make the thought fit the meter you have chosen. The opposite could be said for a 5/4 thought: don’t squish it into 4/4 just to maintain a steady meter.

One can take it too far though. One can make every phrase of music the slave of the text, and then you are left with a piece that has a different song in it for every line of text. You must be careful that you somehow pull everything together so that the piece is a piece and not a montage. That is the subject of Kirke Mecham’s article I mentioned earlier and I refer you to it for an excellent discussion of The Text Trap.

In the early days of choral music writing (think Handel), one would simply have taken one line of a prose text and made a whole movement out of it by repeating it over and over again. There are situations where this can still work (especially when setting Latin or very familiar sacred texts), but most of the time it will not. It is hard to imagine that audiences or performers would be satisfied today by such repetition in the text.