Music in Language (Cont.)

Dynaxiom 2370. It's easier to find poetry in prose than prose in poetry, but music can be in both. 

I like re-using existing prose for musical purposes. Simply mapping syllables in a musical context is a way to make it naturally generative. If you think in this way, writer's block is never a problem. There is no such thing as a blank page in the digital space because the words are already there as usable material as a form of "quotation". And once the words drive the rhythms, you can exclude or replace the words and you'll have a piece of music. Catalog that, and in five years it can be ready to use, perhaps in ways that have nothing to do with the words--at least to the listener. But the composer knows the history.

Most spoken language doesn't have natural prosody and rhythmicity in it. You can't force it. Otherwise, it would be pretty funny that people would go around making everything they say into music. This however was the world of musical theater/film, or of course, opera. 

With the passing of Sondheim I revisited the now almost antediluvian method of having the lyric drive the songs. It wasn't rap back then and adhered to the natural bar lines that language creates. (Rap eliminated this a long time ago and took the sing-songy out of lyrics and made it more conversational, with almost no bar-lining, or the "roving bar line" with the occasional natural syllabication, more as an ironic "winking". Rap has no relation to Cole Porter for example, whereas the Beatles certainly did through Paul McCartney. McCartney always was kind of sing-songy because he had it in him, at least partially from the Tin-Pan Alley days. And more often than not his songs came from word play. 

If you appreciated the Get Back film, then you're still seeing the influence of 20-40s era songwriting. This is a thought I had when I went to the Bowie retrospective in 2014 and realized his songwriting and performance styles still had some 20s influences.

It might be a time to revisit the 1920s as "centennial commemoration" and start writing this way again.

 

Some musical aphorisms, all grist for possible pieces of music, with or without words, or words that are topically similar: