Hey everyone! I’m going to try to do at least a post a week for a while here, and I have a couple ideas in the works. Today I want to talk a little about words. I am fascinated by languages, and since my roommate is currently learning Polish, I’ve been thinking about how we think about words. All of the thoughts and questions I would normally keep to myself about language are overflowing as I think about how he is learning a language, how I learn languages, how languages differ, and what languages and the words that make them up even mean.
It’s a lot to think about.
But I just want to talk about a small part of words, and those are the words we decide to attach to music.
I come from an instrumental background, so thinking about words and music has always been a little foreign to me. For instance, when I listen to the radio, I am usually much much more interested in listening to the melody, harmony, and rhythm of a song than I am in listening to the words. Lyrics are probably the last thing I notice. Often I’ll really be enjoying a song for a month or more before the lyrics even start to creep their way in. This is usually fine, but sometimes I’ll realize I’ve been jamming out to misogynistic drivel because I wasn’t paying attention to anything other than the funky beat, and then I feel sheepish.
Anyway, my point is that music and words are not necessarily a unit for me. The opposite can also be true. I have a friend, for instance, who has never made it through a Beethoven symphony because there are (mostly) no words to listen to. The only reason he ever listened to instrumental classical music was because it was undergrad, he had friends in band/orchestra, and it was convenient. But he would never seek it out. Which is fine! To me, that’s losing a whole lot of great music, but my inattention to lyrics is probably just as weird to him.
But how important is the connection between music and words? Obviously in the case of the Robin Thicke atrocity above it is important, because when you realize that he’s essentially talking about violating consent, that funky-awesome beat ceases to sound so great. On the other hand, while I sometimes get more out of listening to the lyrics closely, I sometimes feel that I..well, don’t. And I wonder if that’s okay too.
I’d like to offer a few different examples of songs I like to listen to, and the different ways I hear them. I’m not really trying to prove a point with this post, just trying to talk it out and see what everyone thinks. So, without further ado, Four Songs Kurt Listens To.
1) Meeres Stille – Franz Schubert
First, Schubert is bomb. Easily one of my favorite composers. He may not be considered one of the titans of classical music, but screw that, I get to decide myself! To me, everything he composes is superbly written: perfect integrity and effortless melody. Whenever I listen to his music, I feel like I’m hearing something that is both spontaneous and inexorable: it’s wonderful, and yet it could be no other way. Nowhere is this more on display than Schubert’s vocal pieces. Meeres Stille is a song based on a text by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
Tiefe Stille herrscht im Wasser
Ohne Regung ruht das Meer,
Und bekümmert sieht der Schiffer
Glatte Fläsche ringsumher.
Keine Luft von keiner Seite!
Todesstille fürchterlich!
In der ungeheuern Weite
Reget keine Welle sich.
Before I offer the translation, let’s take a listen.
First of all, as a baritone, I want to steal Bryn Terfel’s voice and learn its secrets. But a lovely song, right? Very simple, opens beautifully, a little tension in the middle, then a nice resolution. Without any idea of what the text means (I don’t speak German), we can still enjoy a lovely art song by Schubert. BUT, let’s take a look at the translation.
Deep stillness rules the water
Without motion lies the sea,
And sadly the sailor observes
Smooth surfaces all around.
No air from any side!
Deathly, terrible stillness!
In the immense distances
not a single wave stirs.
Holy shit, well that puts a different spin on things. What was Schubert thinking when he set the song this way?
Well, he was thinking brilliantly. Every chord in the piece is rolled, which gives both a feeling of calm just a subtle hint of text painting (where the music mirrors the words) by resembling water. The first phrase is very calm, hardly moving from the key of C, which reinforces the stillness of the water and the lack of motion (lack of harmonic movement=lack of waves). All seems well. Nice calm day at sea. The problem is that to a sailor, calm winds can mean a slow death. When the text proclaims “And sadly the sailor observes…” the harmony suddenly changes and the static vocal line begins to rise, mimicking the mood of the sailor who realizes he may die of starvation long before the wind picks up. At “Keine Luft…” the distress of the sailor grows with a prominent tritone leap in the voice. Underpinning this passage is a harmonic progression that resembles the omnibus progression, a harmonic motion which involves a lot of chromatic pitches, but doesn’t really move anywhere. Once again, Schubert is underpinning the text with a perfect musical counterpart: the rising angst of the sailor, and the stubbornly still sea and wind which refuses to reflect his alarm. The penultimate phrase “In der unge…” seems to be agitating again, but the final phrase “reget keine…” finds us back in a calm C major. The move to tonic feels forced though, a…disingenuous return to the home key. Schubert paints the sailor as resigned to his fate, a false calm that is reflected in the motionless sea, which has remained indifferent to the sailor’s fate.
So in this case, the text is hugely important to the piece. What is otherwise a nice little art song gains huge emotional and artistic dimensions once we understand how the music and the text work together.
2) No Surprises – Radiohead
I know I was maybe a bit behind the curve on this one, but I didn’t know much about Radiohead until the second half of my student teaching. My host teacher was a huge fan, and one day I walked in to find him listening to No Surprises. I was immediately smitten. The song is beautiful. I had no idea Ok Computer was an amazing album. I didn’t even know that was the name of the album. I just knew that No Surprises was a great song. It sounded like a little lullaby, mostly moving back and forth between major I and a half-diminished ii chord. If you don’t know harmonically what that means, no worries: it’s the quality that gives the song that bittersweet feel.
That was the first thing I noticed about the song: the wistful harmony. Next I noticed that the melody has a major 7th in it, which is one of my favorite melodic intervals. I noticed the song had a good build, and a warm production. The guitar is perfectly chosen, and the glockenspiel in the background gives the song an almost child-like quality. Basically, I was listening to everything but the lyrics, and that alone was enough to make me fall in love.
And then, finally, I did listen to the lyrics:
A heart that’s full up like a landfill
A job that slowly kills you
Bruises that won’t heal
You look so tired-unhappy
Bring down the government
They don’t, they don’t speak for us
I’ll take a quiet life
A handshake of carbon monoxide
With no alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
Silent, silent
This is my final fit
My final bellyache
With no alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises please
Such a pretty house
And such a pretty garden
No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises please
(Get me out of here)
So my instinct of the song as a lullaby was right, but it’s an ironic, defeated lullaby. The narrator is through dealing with his vacant existence, and is ending it through suicide in the form of a “handshake of carbon monoxide.” It’s a great song either way, but knowing the lyrics brings out the irony in the warm production and the child-like quality, and also acts as a strong rebuke to the 90’s consumerist culture that produced it. Like with the Schubert, every part of the song is set up to compliment the music. But in this case, instead of supporting the text the music subverts it.
3) 20 Years of Snow – Regina Spektor
Now we move to and artist for whom words and music interact in different way. Regina Spektor is a fantastic musician. She has an incredible voice which she uses sparingly to great effect. She has power, but we seldom get more than a glimpse of it. She’s also a trained classical pianist, which gets showcased in much of her music. Her background gives her songs nonconventional textures and harmonies for “pop music.”
She also loves words. She loves to play with the sounds of words, sometimes paying attention to their meanings, sometimes not. Après Moi, from the album Begin to Hope, features onomatopoeia and clever wordplay to bring to mind bells. She’s also a fan of glottal stops as a percussive effect and of using words to create a unique tapestry of sound. One of my favorite examples is 20 Years of Snow. First, the song features an ethereal electronic track split between channels that bring to mind the snow of the title. Spektor then takes over the same figure on the piano. As the song builds, she throws whole-tone scales, synthesizers and sampled strings into the mix. A drum set only briefly makes an appearance. The song ends with a restatement of the gauzy electronics and piano, and floats away with vocal glottal stops and a piano riff which stutters to a halt.
The overall effect is like something out of a dream (whole-tone scales have been used for “dream sequences” for years, and I think Spektor is more than smart enough to have made the choice intentionally). And the lyrics? Well…
He’s a wounded animal
He lives in a matchbox
He’s a wounded animal
And he’s been coming around here
He’s a dying breed
He’s a dying breed
His daughter is twenty years of snow falling
She’s twenty years of strangers looking into each other’s eyes
She’s twenty years of clean
She never truly hated anyone or anything
She’s a dying breed
She’s a dying breed
She says I’d prefer the moss
I’d prefer the mouth
A baby of the swamps
A baby of the south
I’m twenty years of clean
And I never truly hated anyone or anything
Twenty years of clean
Twenty years of clean
But I got to get me out of here
This place is full of dirty old men
And the navigators with their mappy maps
And moldy heads and pissing on sugar cubes
While you stare at your boots
And the words float out like holograms
And the words float out like holograms
And the words float out like holograms
They say, feel the waltz, feel the waltz
Come on, baby, baby, now feel the waltz
Feel the waltz, feel the waltz
Come on, baby, baby, now feel the waltz
So…yeah. If you can tell me what that means, I’d be much obliged. There are some themes, for sure. “Snow,” “clean,” “baby,” are uncorrupted images, which goes along with “never truly hated anyone or anything.” These are set against “dirty old men,” “swamp,” and “moldy heads and pissing on sugar cubes.” So we have some clean and dirty imagery juxtaposed, but aside from that…
Which isn’t to say the text isn’t set well. “And the words float out like holograms” is set to a previously unheard echoey string track, and “feel the waltz,” while not a waltz, does have a kind of drunken dance feel to it. But what about the rest?
Honestly, I have no idea. And I’m not sure that it matters. I don’t know if Spektor is going for complete comprehension, or if she’s instead trying to populate a dreamscape with the appropriate words and sounds. For instance, Spektor plays an ominous whole-tone figure under “she’s a dying breed,” which clears suddenly when the original piano figure returns, and Spektor breathily sings “She says I’d prefer the moss.” The effect is, to me, startlingly beautiful. Is it that the word “moss” sounds soft compared to the whole-tone harshness? Is it the ways she says it? Is it that the suddenly clear piano texture brings to mind sunlight, and the word “moss” brings to mind the woods, so that suddenly I have a mental picture of looking up into the sunlight streaming through leaves? In which case, is that just my reaction? But that’s not the case. I was partially inspired to write this post by a friend wondering why that same point in the song was so effective. The words hardly make any sense at all, so how is it they can still create a strong reaction?
The answer is that I don’t know the answer.
4) Dýrð í dauðaþögn – Ásgeir
I’ve been through Iceland four times now. I say “through” because I’ve only been there on layover for Icelandair, which tends to have the cheapest flights between Minneapolis and Europe. I stopped over for fourteen hours my first time, and I got to walk around Reykjavík, so that I think counts as a visit, but two of my layovers were only a few hours and I never left the airport. Hence “been through.”
The first time I heard Icelandic artist Ásgeir was actually not in Iceland, but on 89.3 the Current, a public radio station in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He caught my attention initially with his carefully layered tracks and interesting orchestration, and I downloaded the song I heard when I got home from my commute. Later that year, I went to Iceland for the first time and saw that Ásgeir was one of the featured artists on the Icelandair in-flight playlist. One year later I was on Icelandair again, and since my luggage had to be stowed in a far section of the plane, I was stuck without my book. I plugged my headphones in and scrolled through my options on the screen in front of me. Instead watching the third Hobbit movie again (ugh), I decided to listen to Ásgeir’s album Dýrð í dauðaþögn.
It was a revelation. First, the entire album is fantastic. If you haven’t listened to it, go do so now. Really. This blog post will be here when you get back. I’ll wait.
(Seriously, go listen!)
Second, the album is better in Icelandic. Duh, right? I think it’s pretty obvious most songs are more effective in their original language. But it’s more than that. I had already heard two of the songs in English. Only the vocal track is different; the rest is completely the same, but somehow the Icelandic fits everything about the music better. The thing is, I definitely do not speak Icelandic, so why would I say that? Here, take a listen to the title track:
It’s a beautiful song. The layers build well, from simple piano and guitar to vocal harmonies, and then after an effective shift in harmony, the drums finally kick in. Not only that, but the ever rising, striving melody is perfect for Ásgeir’s voice. And then the brass enter, and…it’s just great. Everything about the song fits, and that includes the language. I’m not even going to print the lyrics, because I haven’t looked up the translation yet and also because Icelandic has funny letters I’m too lazy to find on my keyboard. But it doesn’t matter! Just listen to this baby soar! That applied chord in the chorus! The brass break! Mmm. That’s good stuff.
And part of the reason I think it’s great is because I don’t understand a word of it. The song creates an effective arc for me without that. I can fill in the meaning myself because there are no words I recognize, and yet all the sounds of English are there. My ear has something to hold onto, but my imagination gets free reign. Is it bad of me to do this? To just take the lyrics as part of the soundscape of the song, as another instrument? I’ve been listening to this album on repeat since I got back from Europe three weeks ago. Every song has a distinct feel, created by the combination of the word sounds and the instruments. Am I betraying Ásgeir’s intent by listening this way? He even went so far as to make an English-language version of the album, but as I said, it doesn’t quite fit. So is this way better, when the song sounds right, but I don’t understand it?
I don’t know. I have no idea the answers to any of those questions. All I know is that words and music interact in interesting ways. Sometimes there is great intentionality, and the song benefits from understanding that intentionality. Something that intentionality is wrapped in irony. Sometimes the intent is to be deliberately obscure. And maybe sometimes there is beauty in not knowing, in just taking delight in the way something sounds. I don’t know if there is a “right way” to listen to the different ways music and words combine. But it sure is cool.
A Matter of Music 