6. Prose to poetry

One major factor in all this is that the text which a composer used was often a poem, with its syllables in a regular auditive pattern - as its most basic you might recognise a pattern strong-weak or weak-strong (the old Greek names for these don't really help us as long as we recognise them), like

where you can simply place a strong syllable on every strong beat in the music, the places where it's natural to tap your foot or clap your hand if it's that kind of music. But normally you'll be presenting prose texts, of course: so how does that fit? In music, the composer often wrote long freely flowing melodies like a Palestrina motet or Allegri's Misere or Mozart's Requiem: but the chances of your finding something that naturally fits your text like that are pretty remote. Instead you can let yourself be influenced by the older kind of poetry, the kind that was native to Anglo-Saxon England before the Conquest and indeed was still used longer after Chaucer introduced the Italian way of counting the total number of syllables in every line: this approach counts only the strong syllables in every line, and there are usually four of them, like

Actually it makes more sense to think of four beats in each line, because sometimes the fourth strong syllable is missing, though you still observe the beat where it would have been: in

there are only six strong syllables, but you say it with eight beats:

One line may even have twice as many syllables as another:

You will perhaps have noticed by the way that in this style the rhyme may be at the beginning of the word instead of at the end as in the Italian style: and why not?! - whatever is there to make a point, you bring it out in your delivery.

If you're working with a Latin language like French or Italian or classical Latin you might have learnt that the poetry of your language is measured in long and short syllables and not weak and strong like English or German or mediæval Latin; if that way of analysing things makes sense to you and you actually think like that, that's fine, you can place a long syllable on an accented note of music, or on a long note of music, and both will normally work fine: that's the same freedom the composers took when they set texts to music.

The application of this to a prose text is that you have a very organic way of coupling it lovingly to the music if you deliver your prose as if it were mediaeval poetry, but emphasising the strong syllables - or the long syllables - and filling in with spaces to make it fit. When you first try this, you might find it helps to write it out on a big sheet, perhaps of flip-chart paper, with lots of space between the rows, and put a bit coloured bubble round each strong or long syllable, and a small bubble in a different colour round the weak or short syllables, or groups of syllables.

As a quicker and simpler method once you get the hang of it, you can just mark an accent above the strong/long syllables, and in time you'll see and hear these groupings without needing to mark them at all; but hopefully in the meantime you might have noticed that the analysis into two strengths or lengths is woefully inadequate, and that you're working with at least three values: your bubbles might have become compound ones showing one major syllable, a couple of medium strong ones and a little bevy of weak ones -

Not the easiest thing in the world to explain in writing: by the time you read this I hope there will be some animated and sounding examples at www.new-renaissance.net/activeconcert