Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?

Subject: What makes a song "untunable"?
From: CapriUni
Date: 28 Dec 06 - 05:09 PM

In As You Like It, Shakespeare gives us a set piece song on love and springtime (that very pretty ring time), and when it's over, there's this exchange:

TOUCHSTONE: Truly, young gentlemen, though there was no great
matter in the ditty, yet the note was very untuneable.

First Page: You are deceived, sir: we kept time, we lost not our time.

TOUCHSTONE: By my troth, yes; I count it but time lost to hear
such a foolish song. God be wi' you; and God mend
your voices! Come, Audrey.

Exeunt.

In modern music pitch and key seem more important then tempo (at least, judging by which poor souls get made fun of in American Idol). Do these lines give us evidence that attitudes have switched in this regard?

Or (especially in multipart harmony), does "losing your time" give the effect to the listener of also losing your pitch?

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: GUEST,gleaner
Date: 28 Dec 06 - 06:59 PM

My Random House College Dictionary suggests to me that a song might, might I say, become untuneable if it is discomposed by some failing, which might not be an intonation problem. Beyond that, I can guess only that a disastrous performance might render a song too incoherent to be remembered as a tune.

I'm only surmising. There's a lot of that with Elizabethan stuff, isn't there.

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: CapriUni
Date: 28 Dec 06 - 07:21 PM

Yes, a "tune" is equal measure rhythm and pitch. After all, you can recognize the song "Jingle Bells" by a clapped out rhythm alone.

But if you said: "He sang out of tune" to a person raised in the Western 20th Century, he or she would likely think of a song with sour notes, first, rather than getting the timing wrong, as in the lyrics to that Lenon/McCartney song "A Little Help From My Friends":

What would you do if I sang out of tune,
would you get up and walk out on me?
So lend me your ears,
and I'll sing you a song
And I'll try not to sing out of key.

And also, you can find evidence of this switch in the way our American National Anthem is sung: notes are often held for so long that you can't comprehend what the original word was meant to be, but people still applaud louder the clearer and more pure the notes are (thus encouraging the singer to hold them for even longer).

I guess what I'm really asking is: Have our basic assumptions about which "comes first" in a tune really changed (i.e. that Shakespeare wouldn't have fliched quite as much over a wrong note as we would)? Or, does singing out of time create wrong notes, from the listener's point of view (I guess this last question is a technical one, based on how multi-part harmony works with two or more singers)?

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 28 Dec 06 - 07:48 PM

Consider the possibility that the Page (having a tin ear) has quite misunderstood Touchstone's comment and believes that simply having 'kept time' means that he was also 'in tune'. That makes the exchange funny, and provides the shift of meaning needed for Touchstone's rejoinder to follow naturally from it. It would also require that the Elizabethan audience would understand much the same distinctions as we do now; though, of course, a good many, as now, would not.

My suspicion would be that we aren't so much looking at different attitudes to timing or intonation, as to (slightly) different assumptions about the meaning of words and the continuity of meaning within an exchange. Remember that one of Shakespeare's most individual characteristics was the way in which he could shift meaning through a whole spectrum in the space of just a few lines. You need to follow that shift rather than try to pin down one single meaning out of the continuum in order to make sense of the exchange.

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: GUEST,gleaner
Date: 28 Dec 06 - 07:57 PM

That's good. I hadn't thought of that exactly. If a lead singer or a harmony singer gets ahead or behind, in a song with moving harmonized parts, the resulting sound can be incongruous with the harmonic convention of the time, as well as having a discombobulating effect.

WWSS?: What would Shakespeare say?

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 28 Dec 06 - 08:28 PM

To drift slightly the thread slightly, it seems to me that, if anything, it's more important to get the timing right than the notes. If the timing is right, as CapriUni pointed out, we can often recognise a tune. A few bum notes don't really hurt too much, but if the timing is off too much, the tune is completely lost.

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: CapriUni
Date: 28 Dec 06 - 09:13 PM

Malcolm Douglas: Yes, Shakespeare was quite adept in shifting the meanings of words in a few lines, and he reveled in doing so (that's one reason I'm such a big fan). And that's part of my question, too. Is this exchange simply an example of Shakespeare being Shakespeare, or was he expressing a common attitude held by members of his audience?

McGrath of Harlow: indeed. And if someone singing the song comes to a note that is just out of reach tries too hard to sing it, it only makes it worse. Better, I think, when you come to certain lines, if that's the case for you, to drop into a set of "talking blues" until you find yourself back in comfortable range (in my not-so-humble-opinion).

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: GUEST,gleaner
Date: 28 Dec 06 - 09:36 PM

Whatever might have gone wrong in the performance, Touchstone insults the lads on two counts twice, criticizing both the song and the vocal performance in each of his quoted passages. If the "set piece song" is the ditty or song referred to, and if Shakespeare wrote it for the play, Shakespeare even manages to insult himself. Who could best him as the put-down champion of all time?

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: CapriUni
Date: 29 Dec 06 - 12:07 AM

Gleaner -- yeah. I love Shakespeare's put-downs. And As You Llke It is chock full of them.

Though I'm not sure Shakespeare actually wrote that song; he was also fond of inserting songs into his plays (either the song itself, or references to a well-known songs fitted into the dialogue). And this may be his way of commenting on popular culture... As if Tom Stoppard wrote a bit of dialogue that included: "Oops! I did it again!" or something.

Either way, I do wish Shakespeare weren't "sold" through our school system as diffecult and highbrow. I came upon As You Llke It when I was about 15 by accident (a bbc production was being aired on my pbs station), and by the end of Act 2, I was laughing myself silly.

I count myself blessed that I got to Shakespeare before the formal education system could spoil him for me.

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: Tootler
Date: 29 Dec 06 - 05:11 PM

I think Shakespeare is making a very important point in an entertaining way in that little exchange. And that is that it is the rhythm that really matters. If you play (or sing) a few wrong notes, it is not the end of the world but get the rhythm wrong or lose it and you are soon in trouble.

I play music in two different genres and in both the message that is plugged is the same; whatever you do keep the rhythm going.

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: CapriUni
Date: 29 Dec 06 - 06:26 PM

Heh. Or as the teenagers oft-said, in reviewing songs on American Bandstand: "It's got a good beat, and it's easy to dance to!"

I was thinking of this especially, this week, with obituaries and rememberances of James Brown, and how he was credited by "revolutionizing" American (and world) popular music by reemphisizing rhythm, and deemphisizing melody -- breaking away (I've heard a few music historians say in the past few days) from Western Classical music theory.

That reminded me of this exchange, and that got me thinking that maybe "Western Classical music theory" was never quite as deeply entrenched as many assume -- that music pre-Bach might just be closer to post-Brown than we realize (As Sting is demonstrating, in a different way, with his album of Dowland covers).

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: Bert
Date: 29 Dec 06 - 10:40 PM

Could be that The Bard knew doodly squat about music.

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: GUEST,gleaner
Date: 29 Dec 06 - 11:32 PM

Even if Shakespeare knew little of the structures of melody and harmony, not to suggest that was the case, his mastery of verse form should assure us that he would not lose time when hearing sung verse.

He kept a sense of humor about it all, obviously, and I imagine that he might have found serious analysis of his comic wordplay amusing. There's a line of a BeeGee's song that I'll pull way out of context; it is, I believe, "Ah, but I didn't see that the joke was on me."

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: CapriUni
Date: 30 Dec 06 - 01:39 AM

Bert --

I think (and this is my personal opinion-- forget what the literary mavins say) that, judging by the way he wrote so many different "voices" in his plays and in his sonnets, that he had an excellent ear. I would be very surprised if someone with that good an ear for language would have a tin ear when it comes to music.

Besides, in one of his sonnets (I forget the number) he writes about standing at his mistress's side, watching her fingers as she played the ancestor of the pizno, and admiring her playing.

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: Darowyn
Date: 30 Dec 06 - 05:44 AM

I'm pretty sure that Shakespeare was letting the page show himself up as a fool by answering a criticism of pitch by referring to timing- and also setting up a punch line to play on the phrase losing or wasting time.
Incidentally, according to Howard Goodall on a recent TV series, intervals that we would find very discordant were regarded as examples of high musical class in Elizabethan times.
The modern melodic and harmonic minor scales were not settled in those days, and it was customary to flatten the seventh note of the minor scale when singing up the scale, but to sing the natural pitch when moving down.
So in the scale of C, if the alto voice was climbing and the tenor descending, and both sang the seventh, you would hear B natural and B flat together. This sounds like a horrible semitone clash to modern ears, but it was given the name "false relations" and was the height of Elizabethan cool.
Cheers
Dave

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: GUEST,gleaner
Date: 30 Dec 06 - 12:25 PM

I figure that, for every figure of speech or instance of wordplay that I notice in Shakespeare, several get by me; I doubt that many of his contemporaries grasped them all. And so I wonder whether his audiences had any prospect of obtaining the written text of a play in order to revisit what they had heard.

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: CapriUni
Date: 30 Dec 06 - 02:13 PM

Om the other hand, gleaner, many in Shakespeare's audience were illiterate (if not most). and in the common parlance of the day, the phrase was "To go hear a play" rather than "To go see a play." So I figure that his audience would grasp most of what they heard -- they'd certainly be leaps and bounds ahead of us, in understanding the jokes and puns (many of which referred to current politics of the day, which just whiz right over our heads; I often think, that if Shakespeare lived today, he'd be writing for Saturday Night Live).

And if the groundlings couldn't quite catch a line, they could always ask the person next to them, later, about: "what was that joke, when...?"

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 30 Dec 06 - 05:44 PM

I agree with you about the joke, Darowyn. I believe Shakespeare was trying to make the sort of joke where a person of high degree uses a fancy word and a person of low degree takes it wrong. The singers are referred to as "young gentlemen", but they were probably young enough to be called kids today, and they probably were not of the nobility.

I picture a joke such as this:

Portfolio: Ah, young Ermentrude, though art delectable!

Ermentrude: What, varlet, "delectable"? (cuffs him)

Touchstone's joke fails because "untuneable", while a long word, has such simple elements to it that we don't imagine the singers failing to understand it.

Shakespeare couldn't win 'em all.

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: CapriUni
Date: 30 Dec 06 - 10:31 PM

And of course, the true meaning of the joke can only really become clear, one way or the other, by how the actors say the lines, and how they react to them (if Touchtone has a double-take, for example, when kid complains that they were keeping time), and there's no way for us to judge that, solely on the text alone.

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 31 Dec 06 - 01:56 PM

I agree completely.

How nice it would be to hear the song sung as it would have been in Shakespeare's time. "It was a Love and His Lass" has always been a favorite of mine.

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: CapriUni
Date: 31 Dec 06 - 04:25 PM

Incidentally, according to Howard Goodall on a recent TV series, intervals that we would find very discordant were regarded as examples of high musical class in Elizabethan times.

That's often the way with "class" and "Cool":

"Look at how smart and sophisticated I am! I really like things that are difficult, and take some getting used to!"*

Just the very fact that they called the resulting chord: "false relations" hints that those notes sounded as uncomfortable together to them as they do to us. On the other hand, I can also see how a discordant note here or there could really punctuate a melody, and give it interest, as long as it wasn't overdone.


*This is why I'm convinced that so much "Modern Classical" music is so highly touted, even though most of it doesn't even sound like music to me, at all...

Subject: RE: Elizabethian thoughts on 'Tunability' ?
From: CapriUni
Date: 14 Sep 07 - 03:17 PM

(just a note to MudElves): I just clicked on the link above, and my McAfee jumped in, and told me that it removed a Trojan.