It’s a truism that great poetry doesn’t always make for great lyrics. Most composers who have set a lot of poetry can attest to the fact that some of the things that make a poem come alive on the page or when spoken are the very things that make it DOA when set to music.
I haven’t heard much discussion, though, of the ways that poorly constructed poetry can make for effective music. I’ve been writing the texts to my own vocal works for about 25 years (longer, if you count all the songs I wrote as a kid), so I’ve had plenty of experience dancing on this particular cracked pavement.
For the last few months, I’ve been working on an extended choral work, and a prime example of this divergence has cropped up. The text is:
We saw her fall,
her arms extended.
We watched,
arms suspended.
On the page, this quatrain is hopelessly clunky. It gets off to a promising start in the first couplet, but the second couplet thuds: rhythmically inert, a horrible rhyme, an obvious parallel.
Yet, when sung, the cloddities are given space to shine in a way they never could on the page. The reason? The vocal setting takes the better part of three minutes, with each word explored in detail through repetition, elongation, fragmentation. In particular, “extended” and “suspended” both get hung up on their second syllables, leading to sustained “nnn” passages, which create a long range rhyme that drifts into nothingness. There really isn’t a good way to accomplish that in a poem, but it makes perfect sense in a musical composition.
The most crucial difficulty of setting great poetry to music is that great poetry has rhythms of its own, which the music may parrot or oppose — the first makes the music redundant, and the second makes the music impertinent. Once in a blue moon someone manages effectively, but I believe it may be chance rather than skill. Even setting words to music when they were written as lyrics may give trouble — see the weaknesses in Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Elton John and his collaborators (most often Bernie Taupin or Tim Rice) and compare it to songs where the lyric was written after the music (the Gershwins are one good example, as is the work of Rodgers and Hart). The merits and deficits of each become apparent as you study the results. Richard Rodgers, who worked in both systems (and indeed wrote one musical with his own lyrics), provides an in-depth study all on his own.