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Comparing musical textsetting in French and in English songs

  • Francois Dell and John Halle
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Towards a Typology of Poetic Forms
This chapter is in the book Towards a Typology of Poetic Forms

Abstract

A strophic song is in general a sequence of repetitions of the same tune, one repetition for each stanza. Strophic songs in French have the following properties: when two stanzas have the same tune, they have the same number of lines, and for any i, the i-th line in one stanza has the same number of syllables as the i-th line in the other, and it also has the same distribution of melismas. These properties follow from a more general requirement on textsettings that we call Positional Parallelism. Whereas violations of Positional Parallelism are rather infrequent in traditional French songs, they are quite common in English songs. We propose to relate this difference between French and English songs with another difference in textsetting practice. English matches stress and musical beat anywhere in a line. French enforces the stress/beat match in a rigid manner only at the end of lines, which is presumably a reflection of the fact that in French, stress is easily perceptible only before major breaks.

Abstract

A strophic song is in general a sequence of repetitions of the same tune, one repetition for each stanza. Strophic songs in French have the following properties: when two stanzas have the same tune, they have the same number of lines, and for any i, the i-th line in one stanza has the same number of syllables as the i-th line in the other, and it also has the same distribution of melismas. These properties follow from a more general requirement on textsettings that we call Positional Parallelism. Whereas violations of Positional Parallelism are rather infrequent in traditional French songs, they are quite common in English songs. We propose to relate this difference between French and English songs with another difference in textsetting practice. English matches stress and musical beat anywhere in a line. French enforces the stress/beat match in a rigid manner only at the end of lines, which is presumably a reflection of the fact that in French, stress is easily perceptible only before major breaks.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Contributors vii
  4. Acknowledgments xiii
  5. Introduction 1
  6. Part I. Isochronous metrics
  7. Textsetting as constraint conflict 43
  8. Comparing musical textsetting in French and in English songs 63
  9. Bavarian Zwiefache 79
  10. Natural Versification in French and German counting-out rhymes 101
  11. Minimal chronometric forms 123
  12. Symmetry and children’s poetry in sign languages 143
  13. Part II. Prosodic metrics
  14. Pairs and triplets 167
  15. Generative linguistics and Arabic metrics 193
  16. On the meter of Middle English alliterative verse 209
  17. The Russian Auden and the Russianness of Auden 229
  18. Towards a universal definition of the caesura 247
  19. Metrical alignment 267
  20. Rephrasing line-end restrictions 287
  21. Part III. Para-metrical phenomena
  22. Pif paf poof 307
  23. The phonology of elision and metrical figures in Italian versification 325
  24. Part IV. Macrostructural metrics
  25. Convention and parody in the rhyming of Tristan Corbière 337
  26. The metrics of Sephardic song 355
  27. A rule of metrical uniformity in old Hungarian poetry 371
  28. Metrical structure of the European sonnet 385
  29. Persons index 403
  30. Languages index 411
  31. Subjects index 415
https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.2.03del

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Contributors vii
  4. Acknowledgments xiii
  5. Introduction 1
  6. Part I. Isochronous metrics
  7. Textsetting as constraint conflict 43
  8. Comparing musical textsetting in French and in English songs 63
  9. Bavarian Zwiefache 79
  10. Natural Versification in French and German counting-out rhymes 101
  11. Minimal chronometric forms 123
  12. Symmetry and children’s poetry in sign languages 143
  13. Part II. Prosodic metrics
  14. Pairs and triplets 167
  15. Generative linguistics and Arabic metrics 193
  16. On the meter of Middle English alliterative verse 209
  17. The Russian Auden and the Russianness of Auden 229
  18. Towards a universal definition of the caesura 247
  19. Metrical alignment 267
  20. Rephrasing line-end restrictions 287
  21. Part III. Para-metrical phenomena
  22. Pif paf poof 307
  23. The phonology of elision and metrical figures in Italian versification 325
  24. Part IV. Macrostructural metrics
  25. Convention and parody in the rhyming of Tristan Corbière 337
  26. The metrics of Sephardic song 355
  27. A rule of metrical uniformity in old Hungarian poetry 371
  28. Metrical structure of the European sonnet 385
  29. Persons index 403
  30. Languages index 411
  31. Subjects index 415
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