Voice, Recitation and Singing September 23, 2010

Reciting verse and singing are essentially the same activity. We sing when we recite. Its all just a question of degree. Which is to say that there is a smooth continuum between even our most monotonic mumblings and our most admired songs, or more precisely, the central act of their renderings: singing.

Each one focuses on a highly controlled production of sound, or human speech. What is not well appreciated is that recitation is just as concerned with the careful modulation of speech and sound as singing is.

All speech has pitch. All speech has some measure of accentuation and rhythm. In natural, conversational speech these qualities are not usually a concern to the speaker. She's more immersed in constructing short sentences that readily enter the conversational stream. Pitch, and such, are not ususally involved in our daily patter, and yet one should bear in mind the animated talker, whom we all must know one example of, who naturally emotes and enthuses as she speak. Many of these I think exert a semi-control over the more musical qualities of speech. And in this alone one can perceive a gradiant, if only of pitch, from prosaic everyday speech to song.

But voice training is a training of both voice and imagination and memory. And this applies to both

It's probably true, at least to some extent, that those who have been vocally trained, or practice a lot, or simply song on their own a lot, are apt to use a wider pitch range in their conversation, a carry-over, the thespian effect.

Also to be noted is that, especially for our conversational singer, the pitch range of common speech may well match the range typically found in song, especially some of our more monotonous, more circumscribed, simpler, of our contemporary vocal art forms.

The musical conversationalist is probably using a set of routines, typical ways of saying things, that modulates pitch in a methodical, pre-conceived manner; cliché, you might say; or a regularized and frequently used pitch form or envelope that can be applied to a variety of phrases.

Turning our attention away from common speech and toward metric verse, many points of correspondence quickly emerge: The regularization of line, the focus on beat or accentuation. These qualities are the essense of song lyrics of course. The quality whose prominence probably is not perceived when considering verse is, again, pitch.

In song the pitch is controlled rather severely, at least with popular song. Pitch rows, actually a technical term used nowadays amongst music theorists, or what are sometimes called strains, are repeated, sometimes frequently. The need to created rhythmic patterns and to fill out lines leads to a concern with sustain, the holding of a pitched tone or sound over a specifically conceived time interval.

And the beat becomes much more regularized.

These four qualities distinguish verse from popular song.

•fixed pitch
•melodic phrases, i.e. rows or strains,
•tonal sustain
•strongly regularized rhythm or beat.

Poetic recitation has a different approach to modulating and manipulating sound in general, and these for qualities in particular.

The recombinant melodic phrase, which is so much the essense of popular song, is fairly much abjured in poetic recitation. And its easily understood why this should be. These melodic units of repetition, taken together with a regularized line, impose severe aesthetic structure on song. Most particularly stanza or verse set to a fixed melody tends to inhibit the emotional range of the piece. The melody often forces a kind of affective fixation, every stanza's sematics ought to fit the recurring melody. This quality also inhibits the overall length of pieces. Essentially the melody becomes more boring each time it's heard, and so the popular song likes to keep verses down to around three; sometimes with hook, a bridge or a refrain.

Poetic recitation, by eschewing fixed melody and fixed rhythm, presents a much more flexible, nuanced, mode of vocalization [than popular song]. It is as though the notion invoked by the musical notation, ad libitum, were extended from beat to pitch and its contours.

The well wrought recital of a piece of verse can be every bit as engineered as any song might be. The performer may perform with very little variations between different performances. Or he may extemporize, but probably within a pretty restrictive preconceived framework. The point is that both pitch and rhythm, by a practiced reciter of traditional verse, is likely to be as practiced and controlled as they are by the popular warbler. The difference in the looseness, freedom, indeterminacy, flexibility, affective range and contouring, rhythmically and melodically, in performance. Pitch-wise, the reciter interpretation might evolve into a song, if he were to regularize melodic phrasing and beat, and use the defined pitch values of the diatonic system, along such an imagined path the reciter might indeed turn into a song-writer; or a setter of verses.

The reciter is likely to generate melodic and rhythmic contours to fit a particular line but he has little interest in generating reusable patterns, and so produces a new set of contours for each line or occasion.

This notion of reciting as singing is not universally accepted. Indeed it can be seen as counter to the progression from formality of diction on the stage to informality and naturalism, or realism. This movement can be readily traced from the verse plays of Shakespeare down to our most brilliantly written sit-coms. But verse is not drama, meaning stagecraft. There's no reason to expect that they should share a common historical trajectory, or come to common conclusions. Certainly there is less formalism in much modern verse, but although there may not be any recognized genius of traditional versification, or perhaps of poetry in general, still there are presentable works, either in class, public speech, or in some form of recital, for which a more affected style, on that more closely parallels song, is appropriate and effective.

All vocal art probably involves some degree of role-playing, of projecting or acting out of character of what one perceives as their usual self, a fictional speaker, affectation, pretensions. These projections have of course both mental and physical components; or more properly, a role must be imagined before it can be acted. At the lowest levels of interpretation one is focused on intonation and tempo, and articulation, but these choices are integrated at a higher level in the notion of role. Role-playing has value in education. It is used to teach new more effective behavior and social strategies. Social rhetoric can be seen as a combination of grammars, styles, and roles.
[thoughts in progress, september 23, '10]