MUSIC IN THE SPOKEN WORD (2025-7)

I was texting back and forth with friends who serve with me in the Primary organization of our local LDS congregation. We work with kids up to 11 years old. Jacey, one of our dynamic music leaders, arranged for us to take the older kids to this week’s Sunday morning performance of Music and the Spoken Word featuring the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, formerly known as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Texting is awesome, but tricky. I have a tendency to send texts without checking them first. The little critter hiding in my iPhone thinks it knows what I am saying even if I’m not saying it. Sometimes he’ll flip a word just before I send it even if I do check what I’ve written. I’ve found that my odds of getting things to come up more accurately increase if I speak my texts into the phone’s microphone rather than risking the use of my chubby klutzy fingers. The text I sent this morning interpreted my speech to say Music in the Spoken Word rather than Music and the Spoken Word.

The difference between those two teeny words “in” and “and” are pivotal. Analyzing it took my thoughts to my years of learning and teaching songwriting. One of the first messages I try to offer students is the basic understanding of the innate musicality of common speech. There is lilt to our voices when we speak. Most people don’t pause to think about it. But if you’re trying to write music to a lyric, the simplest and usually most effective way to find fitting melody is to speak the lyric and see where the voice takes you. Try writing a little tune to the phrase you speak. Your voice will rise and fall as you speak. It will hang on accented syllables longer. If you can make the music you write kind of match that melodic and rhythmic pattern, you’re often on the right track.

For instance, the other day I taught one of my guitar classes how to play Imagine, by John Lennon. Try speaking the opening sentence. Then try singing it. He has given the timing to the phrase, as it is spoken, completely to the music.  I’ll capitalize the words that carry extra weight in the conversation:

WHAT would you DO if I SANG out of TUNE, would you LAUGH and then WALK out on ME?

There is music in the words.

RAINdrops on ROSEs and WHISKer on KITtens. BRIGHT COPper KETtles and WARM WOOLen MITtens. Speak it, then see how well the music fits into the syllabic weight.

There is music in the words. 

If a musical phrase puts the emphasis on the wrong syllable it will sound unnatural and up goes a red flag of unbelievability. In critiquing songs there will inevitably be some song where the emphasis is on the wrong syllable... Sy-LAB-le...SYL-a-ble. 

Find the music in the speech, put it in the melody, and you’re on the right track.

So, there’s today’s lesson in songwriting. It’s not always the case, but it’s a pretty safe exercise to look for the music already inherently born in the lyric.

Indeed, there is music IN the spoken word.

(now somebody get the message to Artificial Intelligence.)

PUNCTUATION

March 22, 2009 WOTD- punctuation

Call it the effects of a lengthy Sunday afternoon nap, where dreams go askew with the abnormality of sleeping soundly while the sun is high, but when the word of the day popped up as "punctuation" I started asking questions. Stuff like:
If someone has surgery to remove part of their colon are they left with a semi-colon?
and
Why do the lives of women have so many blasted periods?
and
Does a dash have rules in its usage or is it the thing everyone uses when they know there is supposed to be some sort of shift - only they are not quite sure which punctuation mark is appropriate - so...you know...sort of like the dot-dot-dot.
Kate's room mate, Tiffany, also works for Teach for America in Houston. They both teach in low income Title 1 schools, both teach ESL students. Kate's in Jr High and Tiffany teaches Fourth Graders. Both Kate and Tiffany are in the cultural minorities in their schools. Tiffany is sort of accustomed to it, as she is half Navajo. Kate is still learning to deal, she being in the 1% of her school which is "white or other". Last summer they practiced their teaching with non-ESL students for a few weeks in summer schools in Houston. Tiffany taught first graders with her friend Simona. One day Simona was trying to teach punctuation, talking to the kids about those dots and lines and squiggles at the end of sentences. When she got to the exclamation mark she explained what it meant and asked if anyone could tell her something which might use an exclamation mark in it. One little seven-year-old raised her hand and hit it dead on. She stood up, lifted her hand and pointed her finger to the sky, waving it back and forth in front of her face while she cocked her hip to the side and leaned her head on her shoulder, practically singing the words: "Oooo, Girl, you KNOW you ain't pregnant!"
She got an A.
When I first started studying songwriting in earnest I discovered that a typed lyric generally does not use punctuation marks. This was a great discovery! Come to think of it, I probably sub-consciously turned to songwriting as a form of expression, not because I am particularly musical. I don't read music, and I don't play guitar particularly well. Seriously, I can't even jam with musicians very well, sad to say. And why in the world would anyone put such constraints as rhythm, rhyme, melody,harmony, counterpoint, limited length, chorus repetition, bridges and hook lines and singability on their literary checklist? Why? Because we do not have to punctuate! (This is probably obvious to anyone reading this and analyzing the punctuation usage...-:;!)

DITTIES

The word today is- Ditties. (I know you are wondering what this picture of laundry has to do with ditties...in fact you are probably wondering what ditties are. Read on. ) I cheated and did not use the Random Word Generator on this one because it is actually a response to a request from someone. Covenant Records is putting my song Broken on their Mother's Day album, An Angel To Watch Over Me, and they wanted a little piece about my mother for publicity purposes. So I made the word of the day work for this, since I have a heavy duty busy day and am not sure I would get my Lent writing in before midnight.
Cori

March 4, 2009 ditties

I was raised in Pennsylvania, where the winter air could be biting cold. Icicles would hang from the corners of our Tudor house, reaching all the way to the ground. Those were the days I most enjoyed the chore of helping my mother with the laundry. We'd trudge down the stairs with our baskets, into the cellar where the washer and dryer lined the outside wall and where a long wooden board laid atop a set of drawers was our folding table. The steel framed single paned window steamed over as we worked, the warmth and aroma of the room infusing into freshly dried clothes. My task was to pair and roll the socks. I can still hear in my memory, these decades later, my mother's lilting voice, making up little ditties about our task as we worked. Silly little lyrics, set to made-up melodies. Things like:
"This one's blue, but this one's black.
I think we'll put this one back.
Lay them in a little stack.
Let's...keep...folding"
The rhythm of her songs set the pace for our chore and made it fun. We sang these musical snippets back and forth to each other, like little boys toss balls to their dads. If I was slightly under pitch she'd sing the note and urge me to meet it., always following with some comment about how beautiful it was.
All my life, even still at the age of 85, my mother has spoken love and laughter and sorrow in her little songs. I suspect she sang in the heavens to me as well... "Let's go down to that new world...you can be my little girl...."
When Mom laid my first guitar under the Christmas tree, in my fourteenth year, she sealed my fate. She has been the biggest supporter of my songwriting, from that first Mother's Day song I wrote for her back when I was 16, to my most recent recording, where images of her influence are woven into sentimental lyrics throughout the album.
A year ago my mother was very ill. We seven children gathered around her in her hospital room, our guitars ringing with familiar tunes. Mom hovered in that sacred space between heaven and earth, the doctors predicting that she would go and we children begging her to stay. For two weeks she teetered there. She did not talk. But when the strains to a familiar song came from one of our instruments, her lips quivered and soon the full lyric was wrapped in her comforting mother-voice. Thankfully and blessedly, Mom recovered.
Most of who I am I owe to my mother, and when I sing, I can feel her pleasure.