composing

A single syllable

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I recently composed music for a poem which contains the word single. When I was typing the words in the music notation file, I was momentarily flummoxed by where to divide the word (indicated with a hyphen in music notation). sin-gle didn’t look right, but sing-le looked totally wrong (as it’s not related to ‘sing’). Various websites suggested sin-gle, but Google’s AI Overview told me “No, you should not hyphenate the word “single” because it is a one-syllable word.” Huh?

A syllable is built around a nucleus, which is most often a vowel, but in English can be a small number of consonants, l, r, m, n or ŋ (ng). Other languages allow more (see the Wikipedia article.) The nucleus of the second syllable of single is l. Or maybe it’s ə for some people.

There are two complications. The first is that we pronounce single as sɪŋ g(ə)l, which should be spelled sing-gle, which looks totally wrong. The second is that we sing vowels for as long as possible, and either place the consonant on the beginning of the next syllable (especially if it starts with a vowel), or as late as possible (especially if the next syllable starts with a consonant. (One score one choir I sing in found on the internet took this to its logical extreme and had words like e-xce-lsis and a-gnus, which were very distracting.)

The same poem contains the word nightingale, which similarly is night-in-gale. gale is clearly a separate syllable, but the same two complications apply.  

I thought I remembered another song using single, but it’s actually simple, to which most of the same issues apply.

PS Language Log has a series of posts on AI’s inability to count the number of times a certain letter appears in a word or word in a text, starting here.

yods

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Since I wrote about the pronunciation of Dune as doon (/du:n/), dyoon (/dju:n) or joon (/dʒun/), I have been pondering the pronunciations of 

noo (Scottish-ish)/nu (Greek), new, noon
do, due, dune
to/too/two, Tuesday, tune
etc.

I pronounce new, due and Tuesday as /nju:/, /dju:/ and /tju:~/, at least in careful speech. Ordinarily, though. I’m sure I pronounce the latter two as  /dʒu:/ and /tʃu:/, making them homophonous with Jew and chew (but knowing that those are different words). (Also dune and June, and tune and *chune.) 

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New is old and old is new

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I am looking for poems or other texts to set to music. I was browsing through The Norton Anthology of Poetry and saw a short poem by Geoffrey Chaucer (c 1343-1401) which starts:

Madam, for your newfangelnesse,
Many a servant have ye put out of grace.

So even in the 14th century people could be known for their fondness for novelty. Note that the word first applied to people, then later to things or ideas. I wonder what was considered ‘novel’ in those days.

I would have thought that newfangled was from far later. On the other hand, oldfangled is from far later. Merriam-Webster dates it from 1842. So newfangled is oldfangled and oldfangled is new(er)fangled. Nothing now is ever simply fangled, even Dracula’s dentures.

These days, Chaucer might complain about his madam’s new fangirl-ness. 

pesto knobs

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In the past few months, the three choirs I sing in have all sung a musical setting of the Latin text Ave verum corpus, the best-known one by Mozart, the lesser-known one by Saint-Saëns and the very little known one by me. At one rehearsal for one choir, we were practicing this immediately before our supper break. As we left the rehearsal room, I noticed the two youngest sopranos sharing great amusement about something. I asked them what was so funny. They said that the word esto has the musical marking p immediately in front of it, making pesto. That word is part of esto nobis praegustatum (be for us a pre-taste/foretaste). I said that praegustatum is literally pre-tasted food, or food fit for a king, so maybe pesto is food fit for a king. 

Researching for this post, I can’t find whether praegustatum is pre-tasted (food) or  a pre-taste (or foretaste) of the heavenly banquet. Praegustare is a verb and praegustatum is the past participle, which can be used in verb-y, adjective-y and noun-y ways. It is a very unusual word and I can find it only in this text and a piano piece by Charles Wuorinen (about which I can find no further information).

To the extent that I’d ever thought about it, I had thought that pesto was literally paste, but the two words have different etymologies: pesto from pestare to pound, crush (compare pestle) and paste from Late Latin pasta dough from Greek pastá barley porridge, noun use of neuter plural of pastós, verbid of pássein to strew, sprinkle; a pasta was originally a kind of gruel sprinkled with salt (Dictionary.com).

Pages for Mac’s autocorrect changed esto to pesto and also nobis to knobs. 

PS Sun 22: the other word which was hovering at the edges of my mind is antipasto. There are jokes about what would happen if you ate past and antipasto together, but fear not, antipasto is simply “before food” (anti- (from Latin ante- “before”) + pasto “food,” from Latin pāstus “pasturage, feeding ground,” originally “the act of feeding,” equivalent to pās-, stem of pāscere “to feed” + -tus suffix of verbal action). I also (mis)remembered anitpasto painting, which is actually impasto painting, with the pasto part meaning paste, not food (though there are impasto paintings of antipasto food).

my guide

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Speaking of bachs: In December 1933 the German composer Richard Strauss wrote a song titled Das Bächlein, (originally for voice and piano but the first recording that came up is for voice and orchestra), in which a wanderer asks a mountain stream where it came from and where it is going. It answers “I come from the womb of dark rocks. A merry childlike spirit drives me onward, I know not whither. He who called me forth from the rock, He, I think, shall be my guide.”

Strauss set the words for my guide rhapsodically. There can be no doubt that he realised the double meaning of mein führer (leader/guide). There is still debate about his interactions with the Nazi regime, even though he was cleared by a denazification tribunal in 1948. In the early days he might have seen it as the (or a) solution to the chaos of the previous 20 years, but after he reluctantly accepted the position of president of the Reichsmusikkammer he quickly lost whatever illusions he had and fell from favour, especially because of his professional relationship with author Stefan Zweig and personal relationship with his daughter-in-law and her family. The song wasn’t published until after his death. 

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C flat minor

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C flat minor (10 flats) is certainly a rarely used key. 99.9999% of the time it is simpler to use B minor (2 sharps). Someone asked on a music forum whether G flat minor (9 flats) and C flat minor exist and are ever used. Someone else answered “They are certainly extremely rare in classical music. In fact, I would be very surprised if they have ever been used at all.” (I suspect G flat minor and C flat minor are extremely rare in folk, jazz, rock and international music as well.)

At least C flat minor has been. By me. Twice. At least in passing. The first is in a song in Eb minor (6 flats). The bass descends stepwise: E flat – D flat – C flat – B flat. This would usually be harmonised: E flat minor – D flat major – C flat major – B flat major. Except the text talks about deep silence on a moonlit night, so I wanted the music to be sparse and bleak, so I used E flat minor – D flat minor – C flat minor – B flat major. I might have used D sharp minor (6 sharps) (D sharp minor – C sharp minor – B minor – A sharp minor), but that is too ‘sharp’ for my internal musical ear, although those keys theoretically sound exactly the same. 

The second is in a song which starts in C sharp minor and modulates to E flat minor. Again, I might have used D sharp minor, but the rest of the song spends as much time in the corresponding major key, and I’m not going to use D sharp major (9 sharps). From E flat minor, I would otherwise have used a C flat major chord except I wanted a harmonic twist for a text about separation and loss. (I do set happy texts sometimes!)

Searching the internet, I found a reference to a piano sonata in C flat minor composed by the Argentinian composer José Torre Bertucci and played by the Argentinian pianist Alfredo Corral. Further searching revealed that it’s actually in C sharp minor (4 sharps), which sounds a lot more reasonable. I can’t imagine that anyone would write a whole sonata in C flat minor.