Text-Music Relationships
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9.5: Yi-Cheng Daniel Wu, “Poetry and Musical Organization in JIA Guoping’s The Wind Sounds in the Sky (2002)” - shows how JIA Guoping derives his rhythmic structure from aspects of Chinese poetry; suitable for post-tonal music theory courses, discussions of text-music relations, and classes exploring cultural exchange
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8.6: Ben Duinker, “When Hip-Hop Accents Collide (They Create Syncopation)” – discusses the distinctive accent patterns at different levels of a hip-hop track (lyrics, delivery, and accompaniment) and discusses potential meanings of syncopation in this repertoire; suitable for students at all levels learning about rhythm and meter, syncopation, metric dissonance, and text-music relationships
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8.5: Eron F.S., “Flat 2 as Hotness in Post-Millennial Pop” – shows how scale degree flat 2 became a marker for hotness/sexiness in contemporary pop music; connects this phenomenon to exoticism and cultural appropriation; suitable for introducing students at all levels to topic theory
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8.1: Noriko Manabe: “Abe Road: Kuwata Keisuke’s Beatles Parody” – illustrates how Kuwata used the subtleties of word sounds to create a parody album critical of the Japanese government
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6.5: Aaron Carter-Ényì and Quintina Carter-Ényì, “Melodic Language and Linguistic Melodies: Text Setting in Ìgbò” – explores how tonal languages interact with text setting; discusses how missionaries failed to produce idiomatic translations of hymn tunes because they did not translate linguistic tones correctly
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6.2: Brian Edward Jarvis and John Peterson, “Detour or Bridge? Contrasting Sections and Storytelling in Musical Theater” – explores how formal interruptions (“detours”) in musical theater do and don’t behave like bridges; suitable for students at all levels discussing classical phrase types as well as larger formal types and narrative storytelling
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5.5: Matthew E. Ferrandino and Brad Osborn, “Seeing Stories, Hearing Stories in Narrative Music Video” – introduces four different kinds of relationships between visual and lyrical content in music videos ranging from “explicit narrative,” in which images and lyrics tell the same story, to “conflicting narrative,” in which the images and lyrics tell contradicting stories; makes connections between visual narrative and musical content, including harmonic progression, music production, and vocal register; ideal for engaging analysis of lyrics, musical content, and images in music video
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3.3: Stephen Rodgers, “Music, Poetry, and Performance in a Song by Maria Schneider” – introduces how poetic declamation and the sound of recitation might influence compositional decision and the performer’s interpretive choices; suitable for student singers and composers
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2.1: Harald Krebs, “The Influence of Clara Schumann’s Lieder on Declamation in Robert Schumann’s Late Songs” – This video could be used to teach several rhythm and meter topics. The main focus of the video is on the differences between poetic rhythm and Schumann’s music-metrically irregular settings of these text-metrically regular poems. Teaching topics that may come up include Lerdahl/Jackendoff dot arrays, hypermetric numberings, and recompositional analysis; the video could also be used to talk about text-music relationships (especially in terms of expressive meaning), or in a discussion of historical questions about influence.