Now, some years ago I submitted a piece to a competition and the comment came back that my word setting was too syllabic; i.e. 1 note per syllable, rather than setting a syllable across a number of notes. I must confess that at the time I didn't really think about it, but last year a writer I was working with commented on the same thing. They suggested that, my having set their text, they would go back and remove some words/syllables so that the setting was had more than one note per syllable. I experimented with this in some songs and made a determined effort to write in a rather more melismatic manner. The result was successful, in that one of the songs won a competition. But the mechanism for doing this feels wrong, I have to struggle against my instincts each time I'm setting a text.
Currently I'm working on a short opera/oratorio which has long sections of recitative. Again the syllable thing came up and I have made a conscious effort to increase the number of notes. Often I've being doing this by repeating so that the words get the setting I want and are then repeated more melodically. This is something I'm going to have to continue to experiment with. Its obvious that people don't see/hear the relation between text and music in the same way that I do. I could, of course, ignore this but each time I set a line of text I start worrying that it comes over as too syllabic. In some ways, maybe, this is a good thing as it makes me thing again about the relationship between text and music.
Saturday, 25 April 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Popular Posts this month
-
The young composer Alistair White is having a busy moment, his opera ROBE recently premiered at Tête à Tête [see my review ], and now hi...
-
Alastair White (Photo Gemma A. Williams) We caught the premiere of Alastair White 's opera ROBE at Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival in ...
-
Handel Suites de Pièces nos 1-4, 1720; Pierre Hantaï; Mirare Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 4 December 2020 Star rating: 5.0 (★★★★★)...
-
Gimnazija Kranj Symphony Orchestra I get all sorts of mail, people sending my information on concerts and recordings. Everything gets gl...
-
Verdi: La traviata - Opera Holland Park 2018 (Photo Robert Workman) Socially distanced opera is expensive and very much about space, for th...
-
Artist Impression of potentia -designs for Nevill Holt Opera 2021 Whilst the exact nature of live performance this Summer is still unclear, ...
-
Shostakovich: Four Romances on Poems by Pushkin - Lada Valesova, James Platt - Oxford Lieder Festival (photo taken from live stream) Shos...
-
Vincent Larderet (Photo Karis Kennedy) The French pianist Vincent Larderet 's most recent discs have involved the music of his countryme...
-
Humperdinck: Hansel and Gretel - Nadine Benjamin - Scottish Opera (Photo James Glossop) This week there were a number of threads running th...
-
Inside the Longborough Festival Opera big top for Summer 2021 More imaginative solutions to the problem of performing opera in a socially ...

No comments:
Post a comment