Relations between text and music

My opening entry for a panel discussion during the Young Nordic Music Festival 2009 in Götgeborg.

First I will speak a little bit about music without text. And then about what happens when you combine music and text.

Sigmund Freud was afraid of music (1).

He was not afraid of other artistic forms. He could stand in front of a painting and observe it for a long time. He could reflect upon what he saw. But with music it was different. Since music is abstract, he could not understand what it meant and how the music could have such an emotional impact on him.

Do we know more today?

Yes. We know now a lot about the physiology of the brain. The brain is made of cells called neurons. These communicate with each other through an electro-chemical system. A neuron fire an electric signal that triggers the release of a chemical neurotransmitter, for example serotonin and dopamin.

Researchers have observed that rhythmic music causes the neurons in the cerebellum - lillhjärnan - to fire in time with the music. (2) They say that the cerebellum seems to take a pleasure in following the rhythm of the music! If it likes the rhythms, dopamine is produced. If it dislikes the music, we get in a bad mood - usually a lower level of serotonin.

Furthermore the brain loves to be able to predict what will happen next. Fullfilled expectations can release more dopamin.

These are physical explanations of the joy we experience while listening to music. Dopamin.

Freud didn't know any of this. The neurotransmitters were not discovered yet.
And maybe it was not this kind of emotional response to music that frightened Freud?

Maybe it was the way music can make you feel very sad? Do we know today how music - even abstract instrumental music - can make us feel overwhelmed by sadness - or joy? This is a much more complex question and there are no answers only speculations.

So Freud - who could stand in front of a painting observing it for a long time - didn't like that he could not understand the emotional impact that music had on him. He rejected music because of it's abstract nature.
So what happens when you add text to music?

Obviously the music is put in a context which is not abstract anymore. The music is suddenly related to the meaning of the words, the message of the text, the intellectual and imaginative depths of poetry. The words provide a concret context for the music to relate to.

How does music relate to text?

And to be more specific: the relationship between music and the content, the meaning, the message of the text. We may come back later to the use of nonsense texts that we may find when composers or singers want to work with the voice as an instrument, often very rhythmical or theatrical.

I will talk about some of the different ways that music can relate to text: music can illustrate the words, give an emotional response, provide us with a musical metaphor, or have a conceptual relation. There should be a fifth cathegory: independency, no obvious relation.

  1. The music can illustrate the words.

    • A storm is illustrated with a tremolo - frequent during the Sturm und Drang era. A bird in Richard Strauss' Vier letzte Lieder is illustrated by a flute imitating birdsong.
    • Tone-painting and word-painting are cases of illustration, for example the word "high" would be given a high pitch, the word "low" a low pitch.

    I believe you are concidering these examples very trivial. Nevertheless I would encourage you to not neglect this possibility, but to go further and create new ways. Let's look at a piece by Salvatore Sciarrino called l'Infinto Nero. We will hear a new and fascinating way to work with spoken text: Sudden outbursts of extremely fast speach. But - this is is a direct illustration and imitation of the way this nun was speaking during her conversations with Jesus himself. Six nuns were seated around her to try to jot down the extremely fast speach.

  2. The music can express an emotional reaction to the words.

    First example: The very structure of the opera seria from the 18th century shows this relationship in a strictly formalized way. The plot proceeds during the recitativo. Then comes the aria, which will express the emotional reaction on what just happened during the recitativo. Action through words, followed by reaction through music. not at the same time, one after the other.

    But when they are at the same time, you can work with a double messages. There is a famous song about a murderer whose weapon is a knife. A terrible guy. But the music is set in a cabaret style and almost joyful, so the combined message of text and music in Mack the knife from the Twelve-penny Opera is very interesting.

  3. The music can give us a metaphor for the meaning of the words.

    Steve Reich uses the phrase It's gonna rain in the first tape piece that explores his phasing technique. Steve Reich is always interested in rhythms and certainly speech rhythms, so one may think that that's it - speech rhythms from words. Could he have used any phrase? Well, the rain that the preacher is speaking about is not just any rain, it's the rain than will cause no less than a new flooding of the earth. It will start somewhere as a normal rain, but then it will spread and the water will accumulate just like the sound accumulates. So here is a metaphoric relationship between music and words.

    In The Little Matchbox Girl by Helmut Lachenmann the words are cut up completely and every single syllable - or even singular consonants and vowels - are pronounced by themselves very clearly. We recognize a modernist tradition where the sounds of the syllables becomes really important - and they blend very well with percussive sounds from the orchestra. Is this a move from the concrete meaning of the words towards the abstraction of instrumental music? In the case of The Little Matchbox Girl I would say no - there should be more to it. The selection of texts in this work is so interesting, Lachenmann has something of great importance and complexity to tell us. Therefore I would again look for a metaphoric relationship between the music and the words. What about this one:

    Just as syllables belong words, and words to sentences and texts - every person belongs to a family and a society. .... But during this night, this new years eve, the little matchbox girl is alone. She is all by herself. Separated from her family. Completely isolated. And she is dying.

    Did you like the metaphors? Do you believe they were intended by the composers? I'm not sure. Metaphors like these may just as well be created in the head of the listener. But they can absolutely serve you when you work on a new composition or when you are working on the interpretation of a new piece.

  4. I will give you two examples of a conceptual level or relationship:

    John Cage's series of works called Europeras. Very complicated to explain. Europeras 3 is showing in a number of ways different relationships between opera singers and repertoire and to earlier famous singers. The singer selects favorite arias. Arias are also heard from a gramophone. And arias - or rather piano reductions are played on a piano but in such a way that the pianist should touch the keys silently through out. Which is impossible. So layers of different relationships are present at the same time and interact.

    Johan Landgren did a very interesting piece called With Kathleen that was premiered at the Ljudvågor Festival, Gotlands Tonsättarskola. He said it was about relations between amateur and professional. The professional was a British famous singer: Kathleen Ferrier and the amateur - Johan himself. Johan held Kathleen in his hand, in a dictaphone. He could control her singing as they sang in a duet. The words Johan sang was "Carry me". So there were many interesting layers and relations between text, singing and music.

  5. There should be a fifth category: Independency between music and text.

    No relation. However - I believe that the human brain will try to invent a relation when there is no.

    So to sum it up: it is the relations between music and text that we are working on both as composers and singers. And these relations come into play when we can follow the text. And if we cannot - which all to often is the case - we are a little bit disappointed because we know that there is more to it than what we hear. So I would like to encourage both composers and singers to first of all communicate the text in such a way that the listener can follow and enjoy the most intricate relations and interplay between words and music. And why not project the text - or a tranlation when that's appropriate - on the wall behind and above the musicians, which is easy using modern technology.

Henrik Strindberg, for the "I Speak Music Festival", Young Nordic Music, UNM 2009

1) Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia; Tales of Music and the Brain, Vintage, 2007, 2008
2) Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain On Music, Dutton, 2006