An Overview of Collaborative Coherency in the 20th Century

(The following is adapted from an essay I wrote on the subject of the development of collaborative coherency (and songwriting in general) throughout the twentieth century. Naturally, this will be far from comprehensive, but I hope that it will serve to illustrate some of the concepts that I believe lie at the heart of lyric-writing.)
              Often overlooked in the rush to praise instrumental music and poetry is the humble art form of songwriting. An institution probably as old as language itself, the practice of coordinating music and lyrics took great leaps and bounds in the 20th century, but in a manner rather different than those of its independent constituent parts. This is because of the inherently elaborate nature of the song. For many artists the relationship between music and lyrics is symbiotic, one of interplay rather than dominance of one over the other. Thus, not only should the rhythms of the music and the rhythms of speech in the lyrics match up, but the emphases in the music (be they of pitch, volume, duration, or what have you) should ideally correspond to similar points in the music. This form of coordination will be referred to from here on out as “collaborative coherency,” and understanding this concept and its development is essential to understanding the development of songwriting as a whole through the 20th Century; from the acceptable but inconsistent collaborative coherency of opera sprang a vast and disparate range of approaches, from Schoenberg’s rejection of collaborative coherency to Weill and Brecht’s refinement of it to a fascinating reconciliation of the two.
(Read the rest of the essay after the jump!)

Collaborative Coherency, or I'm Kinda Busy

            To begin with, I had better define collaborative coherency. It is simply the term I use to describe the extent to which lyrics must coordinate themselves with the music they have been paired with. It is an essential but too-often overlooked concept.

There are two levels of collaborative coherency. The first and most basic level, which this article will seek to tackle, is simply a matter of professionalism: matching musical rhythms with natural speaking rhythms and ensuring that emphases supplied by pitch do not disrupt speech—stress coherency. A good example of how not on pain of death to do this is Lady Gaga’s “Telephone:”

The music isn’t bad, but Gaga appears to have given little or no thought as to how much the music disrupts the lyrics. Take the line, “I’m kinda busy.” First, read that sentence out loud, just as you normally would in conversation, particularly the last word. Unless you suffer from a crippling speech impediment, your pronunciation of “busy” will place emphasis on the first syllable and leave the second syllable briskly clipped. But then look at how Gaga sets the word; both syllables are given a rhythmically equivalent setting, contorting the normal emphases of the word into a tortured monorhythm. Given that, a lovely band-aid solution would have been to place the second syllable of the word “busy” on a lower pitch, thus giving it an appropriately subordinate position. However, Gaga uses the same pitch for both notes, leaving the awkward rhythm to fend for itself.

A subtler example comes from the beginning of the same song. First, read out “Hello, hello baby, you called, I can’t hear a thing” as you would in normal conversation, or as normal a conversation as it is possible to have when you are narrating your beaux’s telephone habits. You will tend to place natural pauses between phrases, breaking up the sentence into coherent chunks. Gaga will have no truck with this, opting instead to render the sentence as one continuous string of speech, absent anything resembling a pause. Before, the flaw was merely jarring. Here it turns the entire line into indecipherable gibberish.

As a general rule, the natural rhythms and emphases of the music and the lyrics must be coordinated if they are to be yoked to each other. If you do break collaborative coherency, it must be deliberate and must serve a purpose…but that is interactive coherency—another article for another time.