Suggestions for Contemporary Composers on Setting English to Music

As an American singer that sings primarily English-language repertoire, I've really gotten a lot of satisfaction out of being able to deliver quality music to people in my native language - to an audience that understands that language. I've participated in a lot of world premieres for someone my age, and I'm acquainted with a good number of contemporary composers - many of whom want to write for voice. This post is mostly dedicated to those people, offering insight into what you can do to enhance the ease, intelligibility, and linguistic faithfulness of your English settings.

I Can't Stress This Enough

The most common problem I see in contemporary English settings is the misuse of linguistic stress. Stress can be applied to a given musical sound in these ways (among others)

1. Increasing the duration of the sound
2. Increasing the volume of the sound
3. Making the sound happen at an extreme pitch level
4. Articulation
5. Changing tone quality
6. Placement on strong beats
7. Assigning one of the above characteristics (duration, volume, pitch, articulation, tone, beat placement) in a manner that is obviously different from what surrounds it

There you go. Short list. Essentially there's only one common way to apply stress to a sound in spoken English: duration. Think of that word, "duration". The middle syllable is slightly longer, which gives it its stress. Longer syllables give English its rhythm, making shorter syllables unstressed and less important by comparison. In order to set this word sensibly, you would use items from my "Stress List" above to add stress to long/stressed syllables, and avoid applying items from the list to the short/unstressed syllables. To put it simply, you don't want it to sound like "DUraTION" or "duraTION" or anything else weird. Here are some options for how to set this word:

In the first example, the unstressed syllable "du" is being accented by its placement on beat one, and the stressed syllable "ra" is being un-accented by its placement on a weak beat. This is awful text setting. The second example is better, as the stressed and unstressed syllables are better aligned with correspondingly weak and strong beats. The third example is best, as the written rhythm mirrors that of speech. The fourth example demonstrates an effort to write correct stress allocation, but when speaking this, you can hear that the center syllable sounds unnaturally long.

This is also apparent on a more macro level, as entire words can be stressed or unstressed in order to affect meaning. Consider these options:

Obviously the word "tide" is the most important. In the first example, all words are given equal duration, but the placement of "the" (one of the least important English words) on the downbeat is incorrect. The second example shows the massive effect that duration has on stress, as shortening "the" by just an 8th note unstresses it quite a lot, thereby transferring more stress to the important word. The third example is better yet, and shows a more complex rhythm that one might see in a contemporary composition. This one gives both a strong beat and a rhythmic accent to the important word. Again we have an idiot-proof version at the end, perhaps not the most "artistic" rhythm, but one that will be clear and hard to mess up.

The Harder it Is, The Harder it Is to Understand

What is the goal of competent text setting? Intelligibility. It doesn't do you any good to pick or write a brilliant text if no one can understand it. Consider the following:

Melodically and rhythmically active, however...

...this version is simpler in every way, while still showing proper linguistic stress.

In a more demanding register, EVERY syllable becomes stressed.

The 5/4 meter of the first example does nothing to aid text delivery and only adds complexity for complexity's sake. The second example isn't interesting, but is a very simple rhythmic setting that is faithful to the text's inherent rhythm. The third example accents everything by being in a difficult register, as according to my Stress List, pitch is a way of adding stress. 

NB: Just as with every other instrument, the four main types of singing voices each have ranges, registers, prime registers, sub-prime registers, and extreme registers. It is your responsibility to know them just as you you do wind instruments, etc.

Flying Planes Over the Orchestra

Bernoulli's Principle, the scientific theory explaining the mechanics of flight, says that "as speed increases, pressure decreases". In other words, heavy things move slowly and light things move quickly. This means that if you want something to be loud, it will be easier to do if set in a slow rhythm or tempo. If you want something to be fast, it will be easier to do at a lighter dynamic. Don't get mad at me if you want to set a coloratura passage over a brass ensemble and electronics and it's coming out too quietly... I didn't invent physics.

This would be a difficult passage to understand, because it would be difficult to simply hear. A high voice (soprano or tenor) wouldn't be able to project this to any great degree, and it would be especially awful if written "forte" or heavily orchestrated. It is placed in a sub-prime area of the voice (decreasing the amount of weight than can be added), it is set rhythmically fast (decreasing the time able to be spent on each tone), and is wordy with a different sound on every note (shortening the length of each vowel). All of these issues affect the text, as the lightness, shortness, and sub-prime range conspire to obscure the sound - therefore obscuring the text. Consider this instead:

Here we have a better register (for a high voice), important words and syllables are stressed, and vowels have more time to be heard. This passage would be much more easily sung forte or with thick accompaniment, even the melismatic passage. The melisma is delivered on one vowel - serving to add a bunch of fast notes without obscuring the text whatsoever. Even though the second measure will have to be sung lighter than the first measure, the length of the vowel will help it to be heard and understood even if it can't be sung heavily. Obviously not everything can always be set in the absolute best possible way, so let's see if we can't alter the the previous passage rather than abandoning it completely.

Perhaps we're dealing with a play, short story, or poetic submission from a friend, and we don't want to change the text. Here is an alternate version that preserves the pitch landscape, rhythmic attitude, and text, without sacrificing intelligibility. This is in a better range, and the rhythms are better matched to the stresses of the language without being totally perfect.

WWBD? (He Would Speak It)

"WWBD?" of course stands for "What Would Britten Do?" Regardless of one's personal opinion on Britten (mine is that I'd be fine singing no other music), much has been written praising and proving his aptitude for setting English. Britten had one big advantage that most of us don't enjoy, which is that he worked closely with both the performers and the poets/librettists involved. He would work on a W.H. Auden setting, with Auden speaking the composition rhythmically and giving feedback on whether it was understandable. Though you won't be talking through texts with Maya Angelou and Diana Damrau any time soon, you will probably learn a lot from simply speaking through your texts. Does it sound like English? Do your meters and rhythmic divisions clarify, or do they obscure? Do the stresses, pauses, and pitch contours sound somewhat natural? And if not, is that unnaturalness justified by the text or the dramatic action at the time? Will this text be audible?

That's all I've got. And thanks for setting English, it's my favorite language in which to sing.

Why did San Diego Opera close?

San Diego Opera stops operations on April 13th.

Spokespeople have blamed "ticket sales and fundraising", "labor intensive" staging, "An aging and dying patron base", "The reality that the children of opera-goers are not becoming opera-goers themselves", and "The reality that it took nearly 290 people to stage top-quality productions". To no one's surprise, they left out FINANCIAL MISMANAGEMENT. Whenever an arts organization dies, there is always a deluge of articles blaming the people patronizing the organization instead of the people running it, and I for one am sick of the lies.

Chairwoman of the board Karen Cohn said “After 28 consecutive years of balanced budgets, it was clear that we could not continue,’’ - because when you're doing well, it's time to close down. “In spite of excellent financial management, the Opera faced increasingly higher ticket-sale and fund-raising hurdles.” - because excellent financial management causes companies to shut down. Remember, it's not the people spending the company's money that caused the company to close, it's YOU, the “aging and dying patron base” or the uncultured youth that won't support the arts, depending on which of her quotes you read. If you have “excellent financial management”, you don't say that “the company’s finances were eroding to the point where its only viable course was to cease operations” and then shut down the company with “a 33-1 vote”.

“Given the size of its budget, the opera had to raise a significant amount of money annually as tickets covered only a third of its $15 million budget”. Yes, a real life company that's been going for 75 years relies on donations for 2/3 of it's budget. This is what we call an unsustainable business model, and it amazes me they didn't close sooner. “Iris Lynn Strauss, who has been on the board for 23 years and with her husband, Matthew Strauss, contributed $500,000 toward the 2013 season.” Immediately after this paragraph, they say this: “With its patrons apparently on the brink of what opera staff have characterized as “donor exhaustion,” its biggest benefactors were unwilling to invest the $10 million that Campbell said is needed to keep the company going.”

Oh no shit. You're telling me all the people that donate a half mil a year are tired of it? In literally ADJACENT paragraphs in the Union-Tribune San Diego, we have “The opera’s board, and at times (the CEO) himself from the Civic Theatre stage, pointed with pride to years of balanced budgets, even during the recession” and “As part of the nearly $10 million they had to raise each year, they had spent down, at the rate of $1 million a year, a $10 million bequest made by Joan Kroc in 2003”. So when a single donor straight-up gave you your entire fundraising goal for the whole year, you still couldn't make it work.

What is this money paying for? Well, “The opera lists 117 employees on its roster”, and to no one's surprise, CEO Ian Campbell's salary is the highest in the company at $508,021, or 5% of the money they have to raise every year, if you want to look at it that way. “San Diego Opera’s recent “A Masked Ball” utilized a total of 268 people, including ... 92 singers, actors and dancers on stage” Wait wait wait... so for one production you had to more than DOUBLE your staff? Wait... 92 singers? I'm confused, “Un ballo in maschera” has 10 roles and I am currently in an IU production of “Traviata” with a chorus of 38, meaning it can be done with 48 people, but you require nearly DOUBLE that amount? It's numbers like this that pass by unquestioned in these articles, that really start to add up after 30 years of doing 5 shows a year.

We've already seen that this company bizarrely earns only a third of its income through sales, about $5 million. And yet “The production budget for “A Masked Ball” was $2.4 million.” Let's look at this in manufacturing terms. They use ½ of their sales to manufacture 1/5 of their product, and rely on other people for the rest. This is what's known as an unsustainable business model. For this season, they tried to raise more money by jacking up tickets “to $280 on opening night for each of the four productions that comprised the 2014 season”. Does that seem like an expensive ticket? Well guess what, in order to BREAK EVEN at their $15 million operating budget, they would have had to sell out every single seat of every single performance at a cost of $240 a seat. What was that term I used again? Something about unsustainable?

In the San Diego reader: “Ian Campbell, general and artistic director, said, "We saw we faced an insurmuntable (sic) financial hurdle going forward", and does not say what that is. When you don't tell someone something, it's because you don't want them to know, usually because it's embarrassing. Campbell said this of his own fundraising efforts: “For over 30 years, I was on the board and the advisory board of San Diego Opera, and I was a donor. Every time I gave a speech, the group would give $200 to the opera. I raised from $5000 on the low side to $12,500 on the high side over the years.” First of all, if you give a financial estimate that could be off by as much as 250%, you shouldn't be allowed to handle money. Second, this means that over 30 years Campbell did 1 to 2 fundraising press events a year which is pathetic. I would work a little harder than that to peddle my wares to anyone who would listen, in the interest of keeping my $508,021 salary.

Their final show, the Verdi Requiem, features 4 of the most famous classical singers in the world. “Well it has to, otherwise we won't sell any tickets!” You know what? This may come as a shock to you, but you don't have to sell as many tickets if you don't spend as much money. I go drinking on weekends with people that could sing it just as well at a tenth of the cost. “Opera is the pinnacle of the performing arts and it is the most challenging, the most glorious thing you can do on stage,” said Christopher Beach, president and artistic director of the La Jolla Music Society. You know what, Christopher? No it fucking isn't. Ian Campbell and his Board don't get to take the role of Avenging Cultural Angel by playing up the value of opera as self-evident, as something inherently deserving of support because ART and FEELINGS and MAGIC, especially when dozens of people's real-life jobs are on the line. A business has to produce, it has to be cost-effective, and it has to fill a need. It's time for these people to face the music and to learn what their “aging and dying patron base” already knows: you can't spend more than you make.

One person painted the Mona Lisa using homemade brushes and homemade paint.