Study the following composers for ideal role models when it comes to
setting text in a way that never sacrifices the meaning of the text to
some strange musical imperative. These are two men who really understood
how to depict, in music, the cadences and rhythms of speech. As a result,
their music is eminently singable.
Jules Massenet
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
These men clearly understood the voice as an instrument - with all
its glorious potential for creating different colours, dynamics,
emotions, etc., but also with its limitations (like needing to
breathe occasionally). They also seemed to be highly sensitive to
the meanings of the texts they set, and very seldom did something as
unelegant as putting musical accents on unaccented syllables in the
text, or tying phrases through commas and other dramatic textual
pauses.
Two composers, by contrast, who you should study as perfect examples of
how NOT to write for voice are J.S. Bach and Beethoven - both of whom
seemed to forget, much of the time, that the human voice is not just
another member of the strings section.
KM
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My NEIL SHICOFF Website:
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/shicoff/shicoff.html
My Website:
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html
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We're sitting in the opera house;
We're waiting for the curtain to arise
With wonders for our eyes,
A feeling of expectancy,
A certain kind of ecstasy,
Expectancy and ecstasy....Sh's's's.
- Charles Ives
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