In Part One of this series we examined some of the requirements of a singable text or lyric and lamented the fact that such verses were rare and difficult to find. At the end of that little essay I cleverly set up this second entry in the series by posing a not-at-all rhetorical question: “How long a phrase can someone reasonably be expected to hold in mind when listening, rather than reading, a poem?”
This is a very practical question for composers of vocal music. A simple, short declarative sentence can be relatively easily grasped by a listener without a printed copy in hand. Even when the words are slowed to a singing pace, the beginning and the ending of the thought are generally not too far from each other for the brain to cope. But poets are eager to use all the tools at their disposal, and the printed page allows them to create phrases of widely varying lengths ranging from brief interjections of only a word or two, all the way up to leisurely explorations of an idea spread across multiple lines. These more expansive expressions can be challenging to parse even for a reader with book in hand. For a listener, hearing the words without seeing them, unable to jump backwards with his eye and remind himself of where the poet was going, unable to pause for even a second to ponder what the writer may have been hinting at, and forced by the composer’s purely musical decisions to receive the words only when the setting provides them, the gap between the beginning of a thought and its conclusion may render comprehension all but impossible.
Accordingly, it is not enough that a composer select only carefully crafted poetry—frankly, there is a great deal of quite masterful poetry which, despite its merits as literature, does not “sing” well. No, the composer’s selection must be made from among those verses which will survive intact and remain powerful even when the words are slowed drastically and presented quite inflexibly according to the composer’s metrical choices. Indeed, one of the most frequent errors made by beginning composers is choosing poems only on the basis of their appeal and effectiveness as poetry, and overlooking what will happen when the poem when is subjected to musical treatment.
When one takes fully into account all of the considerations listed in the first two parts of this series on texts it becomes a little easier to see why composers often say that finding a suitable text can take as long as actually writing the music…and often longer.
But with those concerns clearly in mind, where do we actually begin our search for the perfect words? That was the question we set out to answer and finally, in Part Three (coming soon) we’ll take a shot at it!
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