Fascinating article by Gerald Finzi on writing vocal music and word setting

[Guido]

http://www.geraldfinzi.org/?page=/about/crees.html

Quite long, but nicely written and more than occasionally very interesting.

This particular skill was one of Finzi's greatest talents, something that he is rivaled at by only very few other writers of  songs in english.

[Anne]

Thanks, Guido, for posting this article.  I have often wondered how the process of word setting was achieved. 

[knight66]

Guido, Thanks. Finzi talks a lot of sense and here we get a version of the debate about the comparative importance of words and music. Here is an extract that is nicely put.

"And today? He would be a bold man who would set Housman, or, much more likely, he would have no impulse to do so. Yet those poems remain the same and it is we, not they, who have changed. Composers too may still be significant even though their language is one which, for the time being, is not in current use. Throughout musical history we find a confusion of idiom with individuality. We condemn a school because the language has become familiar or distant, jaded, or incomprehensible to us, and it needs a rare critical judgement to realize that greatness remains greatness whatever idiom it uses. The mind can be conditioned to accept almost any style, and is as capable of unlearning as it is of learning. A parallel to the fatuous literary criticisms above - is Dr. William Gardiner's opinion, which can be accepted as a general one when he wrote in 1832: "the just expression with which the English language was set, placed the style of Glee-writing very much above the madrigals of Byrd, Wilbye, Bennet and Weelkes. Their pieces remain unrivalled specimens of canon and fugue, but miserable instances of that union which should ever subsist between the words and music." Who shall blame him for such nonsense? He was brought up to accept the dominion of the bar-line, the music he was criticizing was incomprehensible to him. He did not criticize Byrd, Bennet, Wilbye, and Weelkes. He criticized a process of thought which he did not understand. Whether such examples from the past help us to have sounder judgements today depends upon how much we realize that men are great or small not according to their language but according to their stature."

This endless change of taste where some composers do well, other's stock falls, but eventually he feels that quality will reassert itself.

This also is interesting....

"As to those who argue that our language is less suitable for singing than Italian or other languages because its sibilants and consonants make too many unsingable words, no composer, nor poet for that matter, accepts our vocabulary lock, stock and barrel. It was calculated by an Italian, Salvoni, that out of forty thousand words in his language only six thousand could be used for Italian opera arias. And Algarotti tells how Jacopo Peri, composer of Euridice, - la prima opera in musica - carefully observed those Italian words which were capable of intonation or consonants, and those which were not."

The point is whether English is a legitimate language in which to set song. When Finzi was writing, he was bearing in mind a background where a number of English musicologists felt that English was not worthwhile being set to music. That seems a very odd notion to me, especially when I think of how well some poetry comes out in Vaughn Williams, Britten and Gurney to name almost at random and far from exhaustively.

Lots of food for thought in his lecture.

Mike