Last night I got my first taste of what it's like to make lyrics fit the music, rather than the other way round.
Wait, that's a dumb way to put it. Let me start over.
Basically think SATB. Where every voice is singing a completely different line, not just in terms of pitches, but also in terms of rhythm and the overall number of notes.
So the lyrics for each voice have to be different, too. But in the end everyone's line needs to make sense in its own right, as well as occasionally get back in sync with everyone else somehow.
Like, one voice sings a long held "Aaaa-veee", and another one "ave, ave, aa-vee, ave", and a third one "ave verum corpus natum de Maria virgine". But in the end everyone has sung the whole thing, or some subset thereof, or some superset, that is still perfectly comprehensible and complete on its own.
Anyway you get the point. Basic stuff, right. I see all those Bachs and Mozarts do it all the time, and I've always wondered how they'd do it. But I'd never done it myself.
Then last night my new trombonist friend who's working on that orchestration of The Fog asked me to add the Russian lyrics to it. He can sort of type in Russian, but not really. It's a nuisance.
So I said sure, lemme just type up the lyrics real quick.
And started doing it and suddenly realized, FFFFUUUUU. I can't just type up the lyrics real quick. Everyone's singing completely different things!
The altos will sometimes leave out an upbeat. The tenors do something else entirely. And the basses just sing, well, the bass line.
So I had to massage the lyrics for each voice accordingly.
That was great fun, let me tell you.
Like, sometimes you can just leave out a word. Or repeat it. But other times you have to be very creative and come up with new lyrics on the spot.
Last night for the first time I wrote down the first Mandelstam word that he never wrote. It was not his but mine.
In retrospect I'm glad the arranger didn't do it himself but asked me to. Because obviously you having the Russian keyboard layout is not enough for that kind of shit. You have to be actually fluent.
I couldn't do that for a text in Portuguese, say.
You can't just repeat some word willy-nilly, or go looking up random synonyms in a thesaurus to shoehorn them into the stress pattern.
So yeah. Basically I've discovered my new favorite thing.
So I then went and as an additional exercise started scoring our Blueberries romance for SATB.
And that just felt like solving a giant sudoku.
Combines my love for music with my love for language with my love for maths with my love for LEGO. All tied up in a nice Christmas package that I now have to find a way to unwrap.
Shit's fascinating. I could do it for hours on end.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…