Fitting words to music

Subject: Fitting words to music
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 14 Apr 00 - 03:06 PM

Let's say you have a poem that rhymes and has regular meter, and you want to turn it into a song, but you don't have a tune to go with it and you aren't talented enough to compose one. How do you go about finding a tune that works?

When I was a kid and was bored in church, I used to study the hymnal. Here's one of the things I learned. Nearly every hymn had, in small type at the top, a row of numbers that looked, for example, like this: 8,8,6,6,8. This meant that each verse had 5 lines; the first, second, and fifth lines each had 8 notes or syllables; and the third and fourth lines each had 6 notes or syllables. (This particular structure describes any limerick as well as "Blest Be the Tie That Binds.")

Instead of numbers, some hymns had an abbreviation like "C.M." for "common meter" or "L.M. for "long meter." I can't remember the definitions of those terms, but they also refer to certain common metrical structures.

The neat thing was, there was an index in the front or back of the hymnal where you could look up "8,8,6,6,8" and find a list of ALL the hymns that had that particular structure. This meant that all those hymns were metrically interchangeable - any verse from any of them could be sung to the tune of any other in that group. I don't know why they bothered to compile this information, because nobody in my experience actually used it. But it kept me amused during boring sermons.

What I'm suggesting is this: Wouldn't it be cool if we had an index like that for DigiTrad?

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: GUEST
Date: 14 Apr 00 - 03:13 PM

No. Tunes for folk songs were oftentimes different from different singers, but they can't be called traditional folk songs if you sing them to arbitrary tunes that just happened to fit.

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: Bert
Date: 14 Apr 00 - 03:17 PM

I dunno GUEST, I think that singing 'Nellie Dean' to the 'Marines Hymn' is folk at it's best. I especially like the parts where you have to stretch the words 'cos they don't fit.

Bert.

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: MMario
Date: 14 Apr 00 - 03:56 PM

it certainly seems to have been done in the past...a lot

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: Kara
Date: 14 Apr 00 - 05:17 PM

that is to say if you feel you are not talented enough to write a tune nick one, that is after all what folk music is all about, the continuation of old things with the added interest of the new.

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: Rick Fielding
Date: 14 Apr 00 - 05:34 PM

One of my students, Sophia, came to me last night with "positively 4th Street" (Dylan's nasty divorce letter to Phil Ochs). She seemed to be having a Devil of a time with the fairly simple chords.....until I looked more closely at the lyrics, and how they scanned. Holy Cow! That Bobby was diabolical at times. Too many words...Too few bars. I found the recording and was amazed at how he phrased it to get 'em all in. Not a song you could fake just by reading it off a page.

Rick

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: M. Ted (inactive)
Date: 14 Apr 00 - 06:33 PM

Nice man, Dylan--Phil's songs always scanned a lot more elegantly than Bob's, and the grammar was always better, too--

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: Bert
Date: 14 Apr 00 - 06:37 PM

You gotta love him for that Rick. If I have scanning problems when writing a song I often 'perform' them out.

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: Rick Fielding
Date: 14 Apr 00 - 11:42 PM

Indeed Bert and Ted. Poor old Phil idolised Dylan and apparently felt that he could never match Bob's skill with a phrase, but I always thought that Phil's melodies were the equal or better than Dylan's. Heather and I stayed overnight at Sonny Ochs' "deep in the woods" home on our way back from Connecticut last week, and I spent some time pouring over some of Phil's lead sheets. LOVED that man's music, and I miss him still.

Rick

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: Matt Woodbury/Mimosa
Date: 15 Apr 00 - 07:40 AM

Back to the meters, many hymns are set to folk tunes - if you look in the back of most hymnals, you find a listing by tune name, source, and even the meters. I tried counting out the meters to some of the songs in one of my folk song books. It's hard to do, but basically, you just count the syllables in each line, through enough verses to identify the pattern. It's a huge project - probably for someone really bored, but it would be a way to reattach lyrics to songs that had been appropriated for church use.

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: Amos
Date: 15 Apr 00 - 04:42 PM

When you have wrassled enough good songs into your head, mostly just out of love for them, and sung them a couple of thousand times each, you will find that that what you describe above may not be a problem in talent but a problem in vocabulary. Traditional music has a vocabulary of relationships and typical patterns, as well as many many dialects and ideolects on top of them. But armed with a full vocabulary you can practically project what a given set of words might sound good to, and even choose a flavor for it, such as Irish, Lutheran, Elizabethan, prairie, delta, urban, barrelhouse, and so on. At least that's been my experience.

A

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: Mr Happy
Date: 21 Dec 07 - 07:25 AM

Not only do dialects have an influence on the way they scan to a tune,if you're performing a song & you're not a native dialect speaker, then the rhymes don't work properly either.

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: Leadfingers
Date: 21 Dec 07 - 09:45 AM

I never realised when I was playing Jazz , that I was effectively , composing a counter melody round a known tune . My Forays into setting poems to music boiled down to sorting the Fittest Rhythm , then concocting a chord sequence on that Rythm format and 'faking' a melody line based on the chords .

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: Jack Campin
Date: 21 Dec 07 - 10:40 AM

The indexing the original poster wanted has been done - for French songs. "Le Clé du Caveau" was a vast metrical index of French songs (from both folk and art genres) compiled by a large committee in the first decades of the 19th century - I think the definitive edition was in 1838; more than 3000 tunes. It's an amazing achievement and it's quite extraordinary that nobody thought to do the same for English or Scots.

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 21 Dec 07 - 12:16 PM

I've approached several people over the years to see if anyone might be interested in implementing this idea--it's not difficult, but it is tedious. I think it would be a valuable addition to DigiTrad. It's just that I don't have the time (or the inclination) to take on the job.

Subject: Vault key for Seven Drunken Nights
From: Mysha
Date: 22 Dec 07 - 09:58 AM

Hi,

Well, I tried this for a version of Seven Drunken Nights. The "Vault key" would be:
V:15,14,17,14;C:16,13,15,14.

But for some of the lines, this is rather dependent upon the version, with the number of syllables varying quite a bit from verse to verse. And of course, structurally, the song is 14 syllables per line throughout.

If we were do this, how would we handle that?

                                                                   Mysha

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: Stringsinger
Date: 22 Dec 07 - 06:34 PM

Some songs sound as though the words were fit into the tune like square
pegs in round holes. Then you find a song like America, the Beautiful, where
the lady who wrote it on Pike's Peak never met the composer who set it later
and in my opinion, perfectly.

I think there is a tendency toward verbosity in songwriting today. The images
are either not focussed in the intention of the song or the words overshadow
the basic idea of the song. The songwriters of the past in the popular field had
a sense of conversation, imagery, and economy in writing so that the words could
blend into the music in a seemingly natural way. Much of todays singer/songwriter
output seems forced and have not been allowed to gestate enough in the editing process.
The result is that the songs are not widely sung.

Poems tend not to be conversational and require exalted language to express ideas.
Durable songs seem to require less exalted ideas and words that when read may
seem almost mundane but when sung take on a new meaning. The music enhances
the idea that's formed in the mind of the listener by highlighting the words. If one was to just read "This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York Island" it would seem prosaic. Set to that tune, the idea (almost hymnal) jumps out at
you and the words take on a luster. Poems therefore are not lyrics. A lyric must amplify the tune and the other way 'round.

Sometimes a song is a poetic chant but not a durable song. In years from now, it will not have been retained or will have gone through changes by others to give it a new life.
Wildwood Flower for example although I think that the Maude Irving version as originally written is a good song, it needed A.P. Carter to mess with it for folks to pick it up. The conversational language here is a factor. Accessibility is a key ingredient when fitting words to music.

Frank Hamilton

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: Joe_F
Date: 22 Dec 07 - 08:14 PM

Shouldn't the subject line be "fitting words *with* music? I was expecting a thread on how to adjust the wording of a given poem to make it singable to a given tune.

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: Mikefule
Date: 23 Dec 07 - 09:29 AM

There is more to it than the number of words or syllables.

In poetry, there is also metre. Each "foot" (equivalent of a bar of music)may be made of 1, 2, 3 or (0ccasionally) more syallables, and the emphasis may be on the first or last, or even one of the others.

The metre must fit the tune, otherwsie you could end up putting all the emphasis on words like "the" and "a" instead of the important words, and the song will limp along.

For a song, it is even more difficult, because certain combinations of sounds are more or less natural to articulate - put simply: some sequences of words are harder to sing than others.

As for one song to the tune of another: this is an important part of the traditional process. Go to the Yorkshire carols to hear pretty much the same words sung to three or four completely different tunes in the space of a couple of hours.

Subject: RE: Fitting words to music
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 23 Dec 07 - 05:37 PM

Having been to various songwriting workshops, there seem to be as many schools of thought as there are songwriters.
One person seems to think that there should always be one syllable per note, so you shouldn't do things like make the word "be" last over two notes: this just about rules out any chance of the singer putting in any ornamentation. It was also done at the expense of carrying "weak" words such as short prepositions over the end of the lines and making them into long and "important" or stressed syllables,(totally incongruous) sounding to me (IMHO)just wrong, and completely artificial.
I would rather go with the advice of another writer, to READ the words, and see how they READ naturally before trying to set a tune and therefore musical meter to them.