The Music of Language (Cont)

 

In terms of the connection between language and music, there is a finite number of rhythms that can be extracted from poetry and prose—probably in any language. If you read a passage in a book out loud, sometimes you will come upon phrases that are inherently musical. 

The musicality of language (prosody) arises from the stresses on syllables, which have to be either on an upbeat or a downbeat in order for them to be coherent. In musical contexts, you can shape language however you want, and make things wrong for the sake of making them wrong for artistic effect, or emphasizing particular vowels when singing them. Ignoring strict meter and using a roving bar line is a cool way of approaching language in different ways in a musical context. Rhythmic displacement is one of the main tools for improvisation. For example, starting a phrase on an upbeat sounds less square than starting on a downbeat. Bass players are known to do this as well leaving the first eighth or quarter note off the beginning of the bar. 

Yesterday I was checking out Elvis Costello’s new album, A Boy Named If. He’s definitely evolved into a more “traditional” songwriter who focuses on storytelling using primarily an acoustic guitar, singing with vibrato, as opposed to his more punk-ish early days in the late 70s where he heaved the vocals (at least in live performances). His new songs are typically wordy, yet certain lines form hooks, such as “Imagine me, and I’ll imagine you” in the title track, emerges as a clear hook, or are otherwise plucked from the rhythms inherent in the song titles—as was typical in the Tin Pan Alley and Brill Building days. I personally like this style, even if it might be too stiff, with one note per syllable. Music notation tends to steer the music in that direction, as opposed to the more melismatic approach to slur a whole flurry of notes under one vowel.

Anecdotally, Elvis Costello has been known to be quite methodical with songwriting as Composition—probably inspired by collaborations with Burt Bacharach and the Brodsky Quartet. When he collaborated with Brian Eno in 1995 he showed up with written charts, leaving Eno wondering what his role was. Eno’s approach to lyrics has always been more stochastic, using scraps laying around. Arranging the scraps in certain sequences is what makes the meaning. With Costello, it’s always about direct storytelling. Eno noted that he was loquacious, which is interesting in the sense that Costello songs are really someone doing lots of talking.

1/30/2022

[1/30/2025: An example of random fragments driving the music is the Talk Show song I generated with AI. This is a “Lynchian” approach that I really like. You don’t need a lot of words to tell a story with music because the valence in the music completes the story with emotional vibes that wouldn’t exist with just text. Lynch did it by making “moving paintings” married to story fragments].