At 8:12 PM -0500 1/29/06, Raymond Horton wrote:
Damn the plain text formatting that ruined my ever-so-thoughtful
reply! I'm reposting it with the extra spaces that are (sometimes,
but not always) necessary for my posts to look like I want them.
(When I get a minute I'll explore the options in Thunderbird.)
Personal opinion: Any song with 10 verses shows lack of craft on the
part of the poet, quite typical of amateurs, and needs to be either
shortened or "arranged" so that you aren't repeating the same music
over and over and over and over and ...
I forget the type of song which began this thread. In the case of
hymns, large numbers of verses can be appropriate in certain
instances. For congregational singing, variety of musical treatment
is not _necessarily_ necessary, and not all printed stanzas are sung
on every occasion.
First posting looked fine to me.
No, I wasn't thinking of hymns, but of the kind of pop songs that
college-age pseudo-songwriters who have never bothered to learn basic
theory or how to notate what they (supposedly) hear in their heads
come up with. Some of them have the feeling that if 2 verses of
lyrics are good, 4 verses are 8 times as good! 'Tain't necessarily
so. A good many long-established ballads do have many verses--I'm
thinking of Barb'ra Ellen--but it's because they are story ballads
and it takes that long to tell the story. With a song like that, I
do try to reflect the story in the arrangement instead of simply
repeating the same setting for each verse, but that's just me and the
way my mind works.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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