[Golias]

Some might not consider a song lyricist a poet, or perhaps just not a master poet; yet others would agree with me that the better lyrics of Cole Porter, for example, ought to qualify as poems and that he should therefore be considered a master lyricist, ergo master poet.

But has anyone made a study of the prosody of song lyrics? Considering how the "readings" must conform to the music, is there any system or method that can be relied upon in writing a lyric for music not yet composed? I have always had some knack for composing pleasant melodies, and also a bit of talent for writing rythmic verse, but when I try to make a melody for my verses, the music fails, and when I try to write lyrics for my melodies, the words fail. Words and the melody seem to arise from disjoined parts of my brain, and they never combine.

Here, for a starter, is the lyric (by Otto Harback) of a song that, in my day, most people liked. Look at the odd thing the music seems to do to the scansion of the lyric:

THEY/ ASKED me/ HOW i/KNEW
MY/ true LOVE/ was TRUE.
I/of COURSE/ re PLIED
SOME/thing HERE/ in SIDE
CAN/not BE/ de NIED.

THEY/ SAID "some/ DAY you'll/ FIND
ALL/ who LOVE/ are BLIND;
WHEN/ your HEART'S/ on FIRE
YOU/ must RE/al IZE
SMOKE/gets IN/ your EYES."

so i CHAFFED/ them AND/ i GAI/ ly LAUGHED
to THINK/ they could DOUBT/ my LOVE;
yet to DAY/ my LOVE/ has FLOWN/ a WAY
i AM/ with OUT/ my LOVE.

NOW,/ LAUGH ing/ FRIENDS de/RIDE
TEARS/ i CAN/not HIDE
SO/ i SMILE/ and SAY,
"WHEN/ a LOVE/ly flame DIES
SMOKE/ gets IN/ your EYES."

Doubtless other scans are possible, but the longer notes at the beginnings and ends of the lines do alter the reading from that which we might otherwise find natural.

Is there craft or science here that good lyricists know, or is it all instinctive?

Comment? Examples?


G.



[This message has been edited by Golias (edited August 21, 2001).]

[MacArthur]

Have you ever asked anyone else to set lyrics to your tunes? Were you suprised at their interpretations?

[Golias]

Yes -- twice, and I was surprised and disappointed both times. The would be lyricist did not hear the same things, the same emotions, as I intend the melodies to convey. A lullaby became a love-song, and a nostalgic melody for my childhood home became an anthem about Wales. What's more, some of the words had to be held over too many notes. I rejected both lyrics. Cole Porter's tunes and his lyrics seem to match up perfectly -- perhaps because they come from the same source of inspiration and art.

A very fine tune, composed by Herbert Hughes for Padraic Colum's poem, "She Moved through the Fair", stretches some of the words so awkwardly over certain notes that it makes the poem hard to sing:

She Moved through the Fair:

Click here for the melody

My young love said to me, "My brothers won't mind,
And my parents won't slight you for your lack of kind."
Then she stepped away from me, and this she did say,
"It will not be long, love, till our wedding day."

She stepped away from me and she moved through the fair,
And fondly I watched her go here and go there,
Then she went her way homeward with one star awake,
As the swan in the evening moves over the lake.

The people were saying no two were e'er wed
But one had a sorrow that never was said,
And I smiled as she passed me with her goods and her gear,
And that was the last that I saw of my dear.

I dreamt it last night that my young love came in,
So softly she entered, her feet made no din;
She came close beside me, and this she did say,
"It will not be long, love, till our wedding day."

G.





[This message has been edited by Golias (edited August 21, 2001).]

[A. E. Stallings]

Dear Golias,

An interesting problem, certainly. I have no expertise in this matter--but Alan Sullivan, I believe, began as a song writer, and might have something to say on this topic.

You might, you know, try ballad meter, which is tailor made to song. The prosody of hymns might be useful to look into.

Some lyrics of Cole Porter are included in the Library of America's <u>American Poetry: The Twentieth Century</u> as poems in their own right.

Actually, I think song writing has kept the rhetorical devices in use at a time when poetry mostly threw them out. Country music is quite rich in such devices. Zeugmas, of course, are a favorite. Even "new" country. Garth Brooks, I think, has a song, that goes "On the one hand I'd like to stay and be your loving man"..."But on the other hand, there's a golden band..."

[Tim Murphy]

Wiley, I'll ask Alan to look in on this thread. He wrote a couple hundred songs, words and music, and now he's tackled this libretto for Giants in the Earth.

Surely the greatest lyricist is Burns, most of whose lyrics rise to the level of poetry, much of it unspeakably great. He was borrowing all those old tunes, remaking them, then composing lyrics that scan as the strictest of verse. Of course he did so by employing melisma, drawing out syllables over the course of several notes if needed. I have written a couple of song lyrics and find it terribly difficult because I have devoted thirty years to metrical substitution. In a song, by contrast, you have to stick to the beat. It's a different ball game.

[MacArthur]

I've been thinking about this topic since it got posted a couple of days ago. Mostly I've been thinking of "public songs"-- anthems.

The dreadful national anthem, of course, began life as a poem. It's adaptation as a song was pretty unfortunate. I'm an ardent advocate of replacing it with "America the Beautiful" (under consideration by congress), which also began as a poem, if I'm not mistaken.

I believe the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" started as a devotional poem, became a popular hymn, and then was adopted as a marching song by the Grand Army of the Republic. I don't know what the status is now, but I think it may have been the official hymn for a time...the ACLU probably has scotched that.
There's something irresistably compelling about this tune it seems. Not only has it been reworked into innumerable parodies and travesties (most famously by both Ogden Nash and Vachel Lindsay) but also exists as two genuine anthems-- "John Brown's Body" for the abolitionists, and also "Solidarity Forever" for the labor movement (first for the IWW, later for the AFL-CIO).

The labor movement seems best at this. Last May I heard this on public radio and was touched again by how moving the combination of song and lyrics is:

Bread and Roses

As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!

As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.

As we go marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.

As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days,
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses.

Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses.

"I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill" is a tribute to the Wobbly martyr-- himself a bit of a song-writer. The favorite of every camp-fire group, "This Land is Your Land", was intended by Woody Guthrie as an organising song for migrant workers.

W.H. Auden would have been interested in anthems, even after his politics changed...I wonder whether he said anything about it? The French I'm told, may change the lyrics to the Marsellaises. A spin-off, The Internationale is reputedly the most widely translated song in history.
In a documentary by Max Ophuls ("The Sorrow and the Pity") a French peasant recalled his experience as a teenager in the resistance. His cell would sing the Internationale.
Why?
"We couldn't sing the Marsellaises...the fascists sang that."

[Golias]

Thanks; I look forward to reading Alan's commetary on this subject. It does seem to me that better fits of music to lyric are more often heard where the same person writes both. Porter's are wonderful, but others show the same fittingness: those of Stephen Collins Foster and Hoagy Carmichael, for easy examples. A contrary example, though, is heard in A. H. Malotte's setting of The Lord's Prayer. Obviously he wrote the music carefully, to fit the words, and did a good job of it. Another contrary example: Gilbert and Sulllivan. Still another: Henry Purcell and almost anybody (Bishop Fuller's An Evening Hymn on a Ground, for instance).

Worst single example I can think of: Oscar Hammerstein's Bali Ha'i, for which Richard Rodgers had to contend with awful expressions like "your special island," and "head sticking out of the clouds." I have read that Rodgers and Hammerstein seldom spoke to each other.

G.