Bach - Wachet Auf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2h7jZLCtgM

Lorca's "Despierte la novia' based on Bach's Cantata. The German text says: "Another [call] of the voice at midnight and of the wise maidens who meet their celestial Bridegroom."  From Matthew 25.  

3 rules of musical prosody

 1. Strong syllables fall on beats 1 or 3.  [Generally, linguistic and musical beats are aligned.] 

2. No enjambment! [Generally, linguistic and musical phrases are aligned.]

3. Melodic contours (shapes, up and down movements) line up with the phrasing of the line.  

The rules can be broken, but... breaking the rules produces tension or awkwardness. Not breaking the rule is (almost) never noticeable. I don't take it as breaking the rule if the strong syllable anticipates the 1 of the measure by an 8th note or less. But the listener might feel some tension.  That tension is built into the genre, in the case of jazz, where you are supposed to anticipate or delay a bit.  

The music of the music is stronger, takes precedence, over the music of the poetry, which can be more subtle and varied. It can seem to destroy the text, then. But the revenge of the poem occurs when the listener gets irritated if the poem is stretched too far out of whack.  You can override my rhythm, says the poem, but you will pay for it.  

When I set some Niedecker poems, I followed the rhythms and contours of the poem as much as I could, but I noticed a flaw, that I set the word "cranberry" as CRAN-be-REE instead of CRAN-BE-rry.  

 

Tracing another song

The original text is called "Serenata," and occurs in Lorca's book Canciones.  He took the poem and changed it a bit to include it in a play, Los amores de don Perlimplín y Belisa en su jardín.  Lolita becomes Belisa.  There is tune associated with it, probably composed by Lorca himself.  

Billy Strayhorn also set it to music for a production of LADDPYBESJ.  He doesn't use Lorca's melody, but another one of his own invention, but the melodies have a similar shape or contour, in their rises and falls.  

Here are some relevant videos:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rhjnYjKckQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoA40wQgJ58

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcA6I8vWx8Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhiT__Zjmhw&t=51s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTHJ77bOcnY

Tracing a song (or 2)

 There is a song called "El vito." There is another called "Anda jaleo."  Lorca recorded the latter with La Argentinita in 1931.  "Anda jaleo," though not written by him, is associated with him, like the other 9 songs he recorded, and a few others he did not record but have become attached to the canon of Lorca songs.  

"El quinto regimiento" is a Spanish civil war song that begins with the melody of "El vito," using that song as the verse, and the "Anda jaleo" song as the chorus. The words are now "venga jaleo," rhyming with "Franco se va de paseo." 

The fifth regiment song was sung by American folk singers. It tells of the founding of the fifth regiment in Madrid at the beginning of the civil war.  There are two versions of the lyric, one saying "el pueblo madrileño / fundó el quinto regimiento," the other saying "el partido comunista." 

Coltrane using "El vito" as the basis of "Olé Coltrane."  A Colombian born choreographer did a ballet called "Las desamoradas" using Coltrane's "Olé" and the plot of La casa de Bernarda Alba, by Lorca. 

***

I could do a similar genealogy with other songs. "Despierte la novia" from Bodas de sangre, for example. 

Another would be "The Flowers die of love" from Don Perlimplín.  Here there are two melodies, one by Lorca himself, and the other by Billy Strayhorn.  

qualia

 Qualitative critique of Spanish meter is almost non-existent.  It struck me too that most people in the literary field today would not even have the kind of response that Saintsbury has to Shakespeare's verse.  

I thought of a poor young man I met once in Spain, a native speaker of English, who would read iambic pentameter aloud by stressing the strong syllables strongly and resorting to a sing-song rhythm.  I think of a student in grad school with me who couldn't tell when blank verse was blank verse, literally could not scan it.  

Metrics is largely concerned with establishing what the rules are. In this sense it is not qualitative at all.   

Dream

 There was an anti-Trump movie everyone was talking about. I didn't want to see it because I was afraid I would be irritated by the smug condescending people I thought would be talking about him. I was outside in the lobby of the theater, having seen only the first five minutes. I wanted to hold on to my own brand of anti-Trumpism without this interference!  

A colleague came and wanted to borrow my hat. Then we lost sight of him. Later, it was clear he had gone somewhere else. I thought I would eventually get the hat back. 

There was a bird with distinctive markers flying around. It allowed us to get close. I realized that the bird had a pink sticker of Snoopy on his back. I was asking my friend T to help me identify the bird. The other colored markings seemed to be part of the bird, not attachments like this sticker.  

Saintsbury on Shakespeare

 

"The lines rise, fall, sweep, wave, dart straight forward, are arrested in mid-air, insinuate themselves in serpentine fashion as if in sword-play against an invisible adversary."

History of English prosody, vol 2, p. 52.