On Jan 27, 2006, at 11:23 PM, dc wrote:
How many verses can one put under a vocal line without confusing the
singer? I'm doing an Italian piece with no less than 10 verses. How
many should I keep under the music? And then, what do I do with the
others? Add the text only after the music? Repeat the music with new
text?
A good answer will depend on the context -- both the genre of music and
the performance situation.
In my work, I avoid ever having more than three lines of lyrics. If
there are four verses with identical music, then I repeat the music and
split them two and two. Now that we have mass mover and repeating the
music doesn't entail hand-copying the page, it makes sense.
When doing this, split the verses so that 1,2,3 are on the first page,
4,5,6 on the next, etc -- as opposed to continuing forward through
three verses then jumping all the way back to the beginning for three
more, like you sometimes see with cheap pop music. You want to minimize
the number of page turns, and especially backward page turns.
In my opinion, although exceeding three lines of lyric isn't strictly
forbidden, it should only be done if there's some specific reason,
which might be;
(1) Your publishing context is such that you really can't spare a
second page (eg, in a hymnal);
(2) You know that the singer will memorize the song, and/or you know
the singers don't read music anyway;
(3) The client insists on having it that way; or
(4) It's a cheap and sloppy job and you just want to get the damn thing
on paper as fast as possible.
The point is, having more than three verses is definitely a hardship
for the singer. The question is whether there is some other
consideration that is more important than making the music easy for the
singer to read.
Repeating the voice part on a separate staff can be useful, though it's
not very common. I've seen it mostly in 19th century printings,
especially when the syllable scansion varies considerably between
verses while the accompaniment remains identcal. Writing it like this
is mildly confusing to the classical musician (who on first glance will
think it's a duet), so it should be clearly labeled.
I would never print lyrics of extra verses at the bottom of the page
for any music which I expect a singer to be reading while singing. I
know that this is common with a lot of pop music. Any time I see that,
I figure the publisher is tacitly acknowledging that the audience is
singers who really don't read music.
mdl
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