Speech Rhythms in Song

Speech Rhythms in Music
OK, I know I am overblogging (even for me) but I just can’t help it. I want to discuss something that has come up in the creation of song in virtually every generation we have studied in music history; those of regional speech rhythms. We started with this in the conversion from Gregorian chant and have seen it change and develop in art-music through the ages. Though we are studying the Romantic era, I will focus on things outside of this time period in order to help me make my point.

Is there such thing as a song that is truly speech like or is a song (by definition) something that seeks to transcend what regular speech can offer? To set up a possible answer to this question let’s turn to some historical context dealing with early art styles in Europe:

While it is true that the divide between long melismatic Gregorian chant melodies and more succinct song styles were largely based on spoken rhythms of the Italian and Germanic languages, what we were dealing with in that conversion were primarily poetic rhythms. It really wasn’t until the Camerata and early Italian opera that extemporaneous-sounding speech was really embraced in a musical context, this came in the form of the "recitative" (I have posted below a video of the great Leonard Bernstein explaining this). The introduction of this new style became very popular in Italy and over Euope, even still this style was relatively short lived soon to be replaced by the dominant “Aria.”



But was it to be gone forever?

Surely the recitative survived, but it was put to a point of secondary importance next to the song or “aria.” But casual speech rhythms were only put aside for a short while; we see new examples that creep up in the vocal style of Louis Armstrong as in the video below:



OK, but it is still metered music isn’t it? Sure, the rhythm sounds a little more extemporaneous but the breathy pauses between phrases indicate a regular poetic meter. But at least it is a start, to hear a genuine example of a more recitative style in popular music we need to turn somewhere else. We need an example of something that sounds conversational or spontanous, we need to turn to a genuine narrative:



Now, I know that this particular project has been the subject of many jokes and parodies, the fact that both the television show "South Park" and Weird Al have both poked fun at this is an example that people love laughing at R. Kelly. But I think that if we push aside the aspects of it that are laughable, what we have is something that resembles genuine speech. This has been a trend in modern Rn’B for at least the past 12 years and R Kelly was one of its first innovators. In a way it is not altogether too terribly different than the “stream of consciousness poetry” that became popular in the 20th century and probably bears some relationship to improvisational vocal styles of Bebop artists of the 1940’s.

Please make note that I am not arguing for the validity of this as an art-form, I am simply trying to trace a strain of speech-rhythms as they appear in sung forms.

So, as interesting as this all is, it is still an art form that depends on sounding extemporaneous, but is actually a preserved art form. Is there an example of true, genuine speech rhythms that exist outside the context of musical art but can still be considered musical? For this I turn you to the comedy group “Auto-Tune the News” a project by New York musician Michael Gregory. Essentially what this group does is take news clips and process them via MIDI through a pitch adjusting software giving spoken words of news anchors and politicians an audible melody. This is all done for the sake of comedy, but I find it fascinating that in most cases it actually works. You can read a Time article about the project here: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1893867,00.html and some examples are posted below.