A composer who creates music in various genres cannot avoid contact with literary texts—librettos, poetry, prose, folklore, and sometimes even individual words. Many of these contacts are connected with the native language; therefore, knowledge of the basic laws of that language is a necessary condition for transferring language properly into music. The treasures revealed in the native language and its dialects can provide a composer with extraordinarily interesting features that enrich the composer’s musical language. Dialects are mentioned because each of them is a world of inexhaustible phonetic variety and creative possibilities. In music, text becomes an inseparable part of music, and it is therefore worthwhile to discuss their concord more broadly. Thus, the music of language is understood as intonation, the sounding of text (syllables) at various pitches depending on the meaning of words (sentences) or the ambiguity of those meanings. The melody of language is a very important condition for achieving agreement between text and music in a vocal work, a necessary condition for its comprehension. After all, for the listener the text is merely heard; it cannot be read or stopped. Music is a temporal art. If, when reading a text, one can read a paragraph again, a work being listened to (music, poetry, drama) runs through time without stopping, and the author must consider how to create it so that this pace does not destroy clarity of thought. Thus, repetition of a word or phrase—or, if this is not intended—
the speed of the musical tempo, pauses, or instrumental interludes can become highly useful to the listener following the meaning.
Many languages are composed of vowels and consonants which, regardless of how they are written (letters or hieroglyphs), are distinguished and identified by the ear as meanings. Of course, this applies if the language is not foreign to the listeners. Otherwise, a musical work in an unfamiliar language sounds merely like an additional timbre, conveying the same wordless information as the sound of flutes, violins, or drums. Yet this wordless music also communicates much knowledge to listeners. Following the intonations of motifs performed by those instruments, listeners create it in their minds. Thus, even the text of a language known to everyone, when disrupted by poor diction or heavy reverberation, preserves, thanks to music, the information, moods, and overall impression sought by the composer that are present in the work. Therefore, music’s authors are not afraid to “lose” the clarity of the word; they compensate for this exclusively through musical means of expression, using form, textures, and contrast.
It is said that song lyrics should be simple, rhymed, and free of complicated words. This notion is rather primitive. There are many well-known, popular songs with highly complex texts and elaborate rhythmic patterns. Many excellent examples of sung poetry are found with blank verse, even texts created as prose. What matters is something else—how one text or another is set to music. In each specific case, the choice of musical instruments, genre, scope, nature of the form, and the craftsmanship organizing all of this come into play. For example, Franz Schubert’s vocal cycle “Winterreise” (“Winter Journey,” op. 89, D 911, 1927)—24 short songs with sufficiently complex poetic texts by Wilhelm Müller, often possessing several levels of meaning. The way the German composer, then moving from the Classical to the Romantic era, resolves them in musical space can be a good lesson for composers of all tendencies and tastes, provided that they seriously care about the artistic quality of the connections between the poetics and melos of their compositions. The same can be said of songs by the pop groups “The Beatles” and “Abba,” whose structure, as well as the immediate connection between music and text, was examined in detail while teaching a course in the aesthetics of music at Vytautas Magnus University. It was observed that the popularity of many songs by these groups was determined by a highly precise relationship between music and text, a perfectly captured symbiosis of meanings and sound, mastery of form, and—most importantly—the ideally matching flow of the song lyrics’ and music’s intonations. It is regrettable that students seeking mastery of the compositional craft leave these and other highly useful experiences outside the door.
The friendship between notes and letters has been explored since time immemorial and since the practices of early writing. Surviving ancient Greek written monuments record an attempt to depict the pitch and duration of sung sounds with horizontal letters. Ancient seers, oracles, augurs, and priests knew many ways of combining word and music, with which they captivated those gathered for one ritual or another. The author’s personal phonotheque preserves a very interesting recording of an African Aboriginal ritual in which a healer speaks for quite a long time and rather quickly in a language understood by everyone; later he slows that language down, increasingly extending the vowels, and finally only vowels remain with a slightly changing intonation, ultimately becoming a vocalise without text. In memory arises
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an analogy from architecture—the famous Borobudur temple on the island of Java in Indonesia. It is a pyramidal structure of seven terraces from the second half of the eighth century, with a very clear matrix of the soul’s purification and spiritual contemplation: if on the first terraces the pilgrim sees reliefs depicting everyday life, then, as he ascends, they are replaced by images of vegetation, later by increasingly elaborate ornaments, until finally, at the very summit, he is greeted in the stupa by a deliberately unfinished statue of the seated Buddha and a panorama of the impressive valley. It seems that nothing remains, yet there is much more in another sense than what was seen below. Such disappearance of the text—of the everyday, of the word-as-object—into abstractions is a highly impressive and effective means of enduring suggestiveness. I have had occasion to use it more than once and, it seems, successfully.
THE NOTES OF THE NATIVE LANGUAGE
The Lithuanian language is closest to the author of this article not only because it is his native language, but above all because of its beauty and flexibility, richness and origin. It can be seen that the Baltic languages are seriously and deeply studied at universities and institutes throughout the world. This fact testifies to a highly important historical and inherent understanding of languages—not only of their grammar but also of their phonetics. Finally, it also signifies recognition that linguistic diversity reveals another important image of the unity of the world’s differences. And not merely an image, but also a sound-image. An indirect consequence of this modern view is the abandonment of translations of opera librettos into the language of the country where they are performed, while presenting the original—in Czech, Polish, or Welsh. Technical means make it possible to show translations on illuminated boards, increasingly seen in opera houses around the world above the stages. Perhaps this is also connected with growing respect for every language, even one less widespread or entirely endangered. Due respect is shown not only to the language but also to the music. After all, a particular language in a musical work becomes an inseparable part of it, and the intonations of language often merge so strongly with musical ones that when the text is translated (even perfectly) into another language, the phonetic system of the whole disintegrates. That the topic discussed here merits constant attention and continuing discussion and research is also demonstrated by one case that attracted the author’s attention: the study by Viktorija Šeina, a master’s student at the Department of Lithuanian Literature of Vilnius University, The Melodiousness of Antanas A. Jonynas’ Poetic Speech¹. Although the author somewhat reduces the depth of her insights, she nevertheless manages to listen closely to the poet’s manner of speaking and records the variety of its sound, melody, rhythm, and flexibility of intonations. Antanas A. Jonynas is a good example for such listening, though not the only one in Lithuanian poetry. The musicality of Henrikas Radauskas, to which still far too little attention is paid, is mentioned below.
Indeed, merely noticing musical objecthood or the combination with jazz music and the poetry prevailing in this genre, or linking the poet’s work with a melancholic romance and the musical creativity of beatniks, still does not reveal the deep connections between poetic text and musical language at a higher, perhaps even somewhat metaphysical, level. From this perspective, the study’s author is taking only the first, yet highly important, steps in the still uncultivated field of poetics. What is impressive is the author’s effort to perceive the flow of the poetic stream as a powerful compositional structure in which different
¹ Šeina Viktorija 2001: The Melodiousness of Antanas A. Jonynas’ Poetic Speech [The Melodiousness of Antanas A. Jonynas’ Poetic Speech]. – Literatūra 43(1), 60–75.
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words with related phonetic melody “fit” into a strong poetic stanza form: “The cadence of most long lines is dactylic (or feminine), consisting of a long syllable, so the intonation of the line is extended, for example: we appeared / on the stage, let us not hurry / ever again, years / of not meeting, while the cadence of short lines is masculine, consisting of a short syllable, so their ending is as if cut off by the stress, e.g.: when / the stage, the homes / will no longer be, until / only. Such a stanza structure gives the verse a wave-like rhythm; the flow of the phrase is slowed by pauses at the ends of the two lines and of the stanzas, and the text sounds as a graceful, slow melody” (quoted from Šeina 2001: 71).
There are also more insights devoted to the music of language scattered throughout art studies, literary scholarship, and linguistics, but gathering them into a bundle is more the concern of bibliographers than of a composer. The author of this article is concerned not only with the causes of the musicality of language, but also with the practical use of language in a musical score as an equal, independent, and polysemous acoustic instrument. It is therefore likely that such research will not be avoided amid the growth of interdisciplinary arts. It is particularly important for expanding the understanding of meaning through other, interdisciplinary tools of expression. The mere visualization of music, which has become obligatory almost everywhere, has greatly simplified and banalized the powers of musical art and, at the same time, the word sounding in a musical work, turning it into mere timbre without due attention to its riches. The author has experienced how the pictorialization of the word poses a serious danger to deeper feeling in the listener and deprives—and ultimately suppresses—the powers of the listener’s subconscious imagination. Thus the need to dream and make discoveries independently of what is shown on the screen is lost. The process of restoring the word as an equal part of a musical work becomes another task, this time not for the creator but for the art historian, critic, curator, and perhaps even producer. Of course, now that various creative techniques are available to the creator, and their unspeakable abundance tempts one to show everything at once, the question of the author’s restraint, moderation, and selection arises—one to which hardly anyone finds an answer. The word also comes to the rescue here: it can be used to limit one’s frenzy, focus it on a point of importance, and refine it. Johan S. Bach may be invoked as an excellent example, having been able to treat the word in his vocal works so responsibly and sparingly that people began to search for the source of this restraint. It came from another German composer, Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672), who had composed considerably earlier, and from his vocal works. In them, unity of word and intonations was sought, but there were also oppositions—a bright word accompanied by dark music meant to signify threat, danger, or anxiety. J. S. Bach went further. A Lutheran in his convictions, he read the biblical texts so deeply that he created an entire system of algorithms for the events described and a musical language for conveying moods, with and without texts. In an overview article by the American composer and conductor Paul Hofreiter² on the acoustic philosophy of the liturgical texts sounding in J. S. Bach’s music, one also finds the thought of other scholars investigating the relationship between word and music: in J. S. Bach’s case, as the German theologian Peter Bruner correctly observes, “the word in worship becomes a song and hymn.”³ But not only that. In worship one also
² Hofreiter Paul 1995: Johann Sebastian Bach and Scripture: “O God, from Heaven Look Down”. – Concordia Theological Quarterly 59(1–2), 67–92. Prieiga internete: https://ctsfw.net/media/pdfs/hofreiterjsbachandscripture.pdf.
³ Brunner Peter 1968: Worship in the Name of Jesus, St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 137.
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contemplates. Indeed, there is a danger of straying into fanaticism or shallow piety, but a noble [something] protects against those sins, a strong psychological connection of the word with musical intonation. Without intending to support these insights with a greater number of examples, since that would stray into the galleries of academic musicology, the aim was to show what power lies in the tools of art that create a diversity of spiritual experience. It is interesting that in J. S. Bach’s secular instrumental music the theological nature of intonations does not disappear, and in many works it hides beneath a veil of keys, tempi, and instruments. Rising intonations meant boundless hope to J. S. Bach, falling ones—despair, those revolving in place—pain and sorrow, leaping ones—joy and... foolishness, while sequences of long notes meant wisdom. Thus even the name of Mary acquired its musical expression; the phonetics of the word could be heard in musical intonation, and, relying solely on melodic symbolism, one could do without it. Such listening skills, now irreversibly diminished, determined the richness of musical language and, ultimately, its persuasive longevity. Today the listener often grasps these subtleties not with the mind but with the subconscious.
In the author’s personal creative experiences with the music of language, an apparently insignificant episode is recalled at first glance. Writing the libretto for the opera “Queen Bona” involved many historical challenges. Help had to be sought. It came from Prof. Dr. Jūratė Kiaupienė, who helped overcome the mountain of ignorance. And that detail is truly small: how did a mother address her son in the Renaissance—thou or you? Historically, only the second form was appropriate. This was very important information, because the two forms differ greatly. The first, indicating close kinship, is as if cut off; the second is more respectful, with the distance of relations between close persons, but also gentler. Moreover, in the address thou we hear a note of imperiousness, while you has many nuances—from gentle and protective to ironic, sarcastic, and ambiguous you. It was precisely the second that I needed. It is unknown with what timbre, vocal strength, or tempo, and with what intonations, that address reached the ears of her son Žygimantas Augustus, but with one word it was possible to create various moods and meanings emphasized by musical intonations.
The author’s experiences of a direct connection with the Lithuanian language in creative practice are abundant and different each time. Several of them will be discussed below.
Studies of Lithuanian folk songs should become lessons in the unity of word and sound for every composer. Their benefit emerges later, unexpectedly, even subconsciously. Sometimes it is necessary to create new music for a folk text, as happened in the opera “The Prussians” with the chorus song “On the Hill,” important to the dramaturgy of the entire work. An original melody was needed for the unity of the overall musical style and for certain intonational tasks. The first phrase acquired particular importance because it had to remain at least somewhat memorable to listeners after sounding for the first time at the beginning of the opera. Then, recurring in the finale, now with the voice of Herkus Mantas, it would conclude the tragedy of the dying tribe. A somewhat swaying motif was born, its melodic line reproducing the contour of a small hill, or perhaps a burial mound. What could be possessed in the subconscious and already known from before were, unfortunately, rather meager features of Baltic musical culture. The significance of tempo and tonality also had to highlight the text, which, incidentally, had no direct connection with the plot, only transferred meanings. Thus, in the music too, a literal depiction of the text would in no way satisfy
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the artistic meaning, although the idea and mood of the text had to be preserved, especially in the context of the opera’s dramaturgy. The illustrations present a well-known folk-song motif and the author’s original one from the opera “The Prussians.” It is interesting that reviewers noticed the song, although they incorrectly attributed it to folk creation. In fact, the melody of the selected text was unknown to the author of the article, because the search for it had yielded no results at the time. While writing this article, he therefore wondered whether the melody of that text might be found somewhere. The staff of the Lithuanian Institute of Literature and Folklore were asked whether the melody might be in their archives. Ethnographer Jurgita Ūsaitvtė sent several links to archival sound recordings in which, under various titles (“At the Hillside, in the Meadow There It Stood,” “In the Green Wood, in the Level Meadow,” “Oh, My Son, Oh, My Rider”), different versions of the song recorded on phonograph records in 1937 could be heard. Finally, in the folk-music archive accumulated by the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, the closest recording to the author’s use of the text, the war song (ballad) “On the Hill, on the High One,” was found⁴. It was sung by the folk singer Domiuka Beležanskiūtė-Bukauskienė. Both motifs are presented, revealing how different they are.
Figure 1. Lithuanian folk song “On the Hill”
Figure 2. G. Kuprevičius “On the Hill,” chorus from the opera “The Prussians,” 1994
The musicality of H. Radauskas’s (1910–1970) poetry is unsurpassable, unique, and simply perfect in many poems. This result was not achieved immediately. Leafing through the poet’s manuscripts, one can see how carefully and exactingly the poetic line, sequences of words, and the play of rhyme and rhythm were polished. Such mastery of poetic melody was achieved with a very rich language, through rhyming synonyms and words that sound similar to the ear but have different meanings. Attracted by these qualities, the author of this article has repeatedly drawn close to H. Radauskas’s poems.
⁴ Lithuanian folk song “On the Hill, on the High One.” Sung by the folk singer Domiuka Beležanskiūtė-Bukauskienė, born in 1895 (LMTA musical folklore archive, original medium No. KF_3532_017, recorded in 1961, Lazdijai district, Seirijai area, Statiškė).
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“The Green Earth Blooms”⁵ is one of them. It is interesting that the poetic line itself calls forth a musical motif, and all that remains is to record it. The first stanza, “The green earth blooms, / Having drowned its anguish, / The homeless twilight / Celebrates birth,” is saturated with letters highly inconvenient for singing—“ž, č, š”—yet precisely that ugly abundance of consonants for the voice creates a special music of language, different from that produced by the vowel dominance customary in songs. A similar situation occurs with another poem—“Autumn in the Park”⁶, in whose first stanza the poet emphatically clones the consonant “r”: “Cruel, suicidal autumn / Makes noble statues weep, / And the water of tears flows / Into cups of black marble.” I would compare such a poetic structure with the engravings of the Dutch graphic artist Maurits C. Escher (1898–1912), in which objects of one meaning consistently merge into others. In exactly the same way, H. Radauskas turns one signifying word into another meaning, and melodically joins it to the next, as though they were an inseparable unity—“the distance turned blue from the cold, / Like a dead leaf, the clay turned red. The same compositional technique (one from another) is fundamental to the language of music. Following the characteristics of H. Radauskas’s poetic language, the composer need only properly harmonize those relationships between language and music.
IN THE CIRCLE OF THE LESSON
Perhaps the greatest collision between language and music in the author’s creative work occurred in the antiopera⁷ “The Lesson” (1978), inspired by the French writer Eugène Ionesco’s (1909–1994) absurdist play “La Leçon.” The nature of the text created excellent conditions for games with language, individual words, syllables, and conflicts between vowels and consonants. The musical rhythm of the text allowed variations of those games to be organized into an endless flow of sounds in which meanings and meaninglessness, combinations of thoughts and disrupted logic of thought, and absurd situations provoking thought sank and rose to the surface.
The work’s antioperatic character was produced by the rejection of arias and orchestra, while the play translated into Lithuanian allowed sequences of words to be presented to a listener who knew the language in an almost unrecognizably distorted form. Only attentive listening could then catch what was being discussed (sung). The techniques and textures of melodrama, recitative, speech-song, known in German as Sprechgesang and Sprechstimme⁸, proved useful. But even that was not enough. To achieve more precise intoning of letters, syllables, or words, musical notation was employed to fix durations and pitch. The tradition of so-called drawn music is quite old, perhaps even older than the system of musical notation now known. Graphic notation of music calls for a more intellectual mode of interpretation than precisely written notes accompanied by numerous dynamic markings. Drawn music,
⁵ Radauskas Henrikas 1980: Lyrika [Lyriсs], Vilnius: Vaga, 42.
⁶ Radauskas Henrikas 1980: Lyrika [Lyriсs], Vilnius: Vaga, 228.
⁷ “The Lesson” was called an antiopera because of its renunciation of traditional operatic components (arias, orchestra). The Hungarian composer Gyorg Ligeti also called his stage work about the destruction of the world, “Le Grand Macabre,” an antiopera, but more because, according to the author, it was not intended for lovers of traditional opera.
⁸ Sprechgesang / Sprechstimme – German: speech-song, melodrama / recitative, parlando – musical delivery of text following the rhythm of words and the intonations of everyday speech. Found in some works by Richard Wagner, Engelbert Humperdinck, Arnold Schoenberg, and others.
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having abandoned traditional musical notation, enables performers to be given fairly precise instructions during the performance for the conditional musical sequences they themselves create according to those drawings, while allowing them to decide for themselves on the length of pauses, tempo, and various glissando, staccato, or tenuto bowings. Exact vocal pitch became less important. After all, in the antiopera there are neither arias nor precisely written melodies, and the roles may be performed even by non-operatic singers, drama actors with minimal vocal training. Thus, in this work, every performer is allowed to express intoned speech in a way convenient to them. There are also no traditional ensembles or choruses in “The Lesson,” but a certain system of rhythmic and intonational speech and the interplay of separate groups must be taken into account. That system is intended to emphasize the dynamics of events and create a stronger acoustic sound. Together with stage movement, variety and contrasts were sought, without which a large-scale work would become monotonous and lose the spectators’ interest. Form, which was already present in the play itself, was also important for organizing the whole; with all the antimusical accompaniment, it could be emphasized even further.
Figure 3. G. Kuprevičius “The Lesson,” 1978, score fragment I
Figure 4. G. Kuprevičius “The Lesson,” 1978, score fragment II
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Only at the very end of the antiopera does a traditional musical language, written as Coda, sound. In it, the listener is returned to the customary world of musical expression. Yet soon we once again move from the beautiful opera into the beginning of the antiopera...
Nothing else demonstrates the disturbing mixture of absurdity and banal reality better than games of language and music unrestrained by canons or fantasy.
An occasion for mentioning the connections with language of yet another composition, “Circus-Ratas,” which appeared on the page and was born in 1971 after a deeper acquaintance with Jonas Mekas’s poetry. It happened that at that time the State Security Committee of the Lithuanian SSR allowed private individuals to keep a typewriter at home. After officially acquiring one and learning typing technique, an attempt was made to apply it not only to one’s own articles but also to creating musical compositions without notation. According to the concept, the guide of the composition “Circus-Ratas” led the performers, seated in a circle, intoning the text in ever-different tones and gradually joining in, from “do” to “do” through all the keys. The process can be repeated countless times, stopping at any moment. The poet’s phrase “What was resolved with yesterday repeats itself again with the dawn” suggested a musical solution as well.
5 illustration. G. Kuprevičius “Circus-Ratas,” 1971.
Similar playful experiments with the visualization of texts can be found in the poems of Pablo Neruda (1904–1973)10 and Edward E. Cummings (1894–1962)11, based on typographic signs, in which meanings are reinforced by changes in typeface and letter size. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) spread poetic imagery to readers in yet another way, depicting the meanings of words through drawings composed of letters. True, none of the authors mentioned, nor the visualizations of poetic texts they created, are connected with the art of music; however, who knows, perhaps such a symbiosis is possible as well.
9 Mekas Jonas 1971: One Trip’s Fragments [Fragments of One Trip]. – Poetry, Vilnius: Vaga, 147. 10 Neruda Pablo 1986: Ode to the Press [Ode to the Press], Vilnius: Vyturys. 11 For example, the poem “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-g-r” in the collection No Thanks (1965).
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FOREIGN-LANGUAGE ORCHESTRA
A Lithuanian-speaking composer finds himself in a different situation when composing music for texts in other languages. This occurs with works set to texts by German, English, French, or Polish poets, which have very different phonetics, grammars, syllabification, and a soundscape specific to each language. One must walk through it every time one takes up texts in other languages. A word expressing the same meaning—for example, joy—sounds differently in English, joy, German, freude, French, joie, or Finnish, ilo. Clearly, musical intonations cannot be the same; they must submit to the music of the language in question. Of course, one need not follow the intonations of language blindly—in the art of music, the use of expressive means characteristic of its qualities, and their dominance, is desirable. This can be found, for example, in the finale of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in which the composer presents the word “joy!” from Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” not so much with regard to phonetics as to meaning—in the simplest exclamation, “Freude!”:
6 illustration. L. van Beethoven, fragment from the finale of the Ninth Symphony
Speaking about the musicality of the German language would require considerably more time and attention devoted to this topic, because the sound system of West Germanic languages at first glance seems off-putting in its hard, clipped expression and strong endings, with a sonority seemingly foreign to melodic flow or beautiful musical lyricism. Yet practice shows something quite different—songs in German become unexpectedly gentle phonetically, for example in the songs of Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and Richard Strauss. The linguistic features mentioned seem to hide beneath the veil of musical language. This can be felt when working with Johann W. Goethe’s verse. Once drawn into the musical flow, the text changes, softens, and acquires very many melodic nuances and turns. Thus, in the song “Mit einem gemalten Band” (“With a Painted Ribbon”), the article’s author unfurled the melody for the text like a moving ribbon, immersing in it the hardness characteristic of the German language.
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7 illustration. G. Kuprevičius “Mit einem gemalten Band,” from the vocal cycle “Goetheliederbuch,” 2006.
And in the song “Mingon IV,” he concentrated all his attention on the text and abandoned the melodiousness customary to the genre.
8 illustration. G. Kuprevičius “Mingon IV,” from the vocal cycle “Goetheliederbuch,” 2006.
Even in such a non-melodious form of music, the words sound different from how they would if merely read. English undergoes this change as well, especially monosyllabic words, which are otherwise unfavorable to the listener in vocal music because of their brevity. But music slows all texts down regardless of tempo, because it is impossible to sing faster than living speech. It is then that those monosyllabic words become meaningful, are heard, no longer rushing past the roadside of attention like the wind, but pausing.
It is often debated whether texts can be heard in vocal music, or whether they disappear within it and their value is diminished. I remember a conversation with the poet Justinas Marcinkevičius, when
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I asked permission to use the poem “A Difficult Autumn” for a song. The poet, perhaps joking, or perhaps seriously, asked: “Is that poem really so poor that it needs music?”
The creative friendship between composer and poet is so old and has so many faces that it is very difficult to answer the poet’s question. It happens in all sorts of ways, but poetics and melos more often agree than suppress one another. In the work, they are simply inseparable and journey toward the goal of shared creative success.
WORDS AS MUSIC
The music of the cycle “Texts for Violin solo” (2019) was inspired by poems by poets of various nationalities, but this time the music sounds without words. The aim was to transfer the intonations of the music of language into the violin’s solo voice. The discovery, in the vast reaches of the internet, of a recording of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire reciting the poem “Le Pont Mirabeau” (“The Mirabeau Bridge”) (1913) was a source of delight. The intonations of the poet’s recitation captured in it became the music of a section of the cycle. Later, following the violin’s inherent specificity, they were freely transcribed and stylized. Thanks to software, the archival recording was considerably slowed without changing the pitch, so that another program could highlight the intervals of speech and turn them into specific notes. The illustrations show this process.
9 illustration. Graphic representation of poet G. Apollinaire’s archival recording “Le Pont Mirabeau”
10 illustration. G. Kuprevičius “Le Pont Mirabeau,” from the cycle “Texts for Violin,” 2019.
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The melodies of the poem read by the poet became the foundation of the violin’s voice. In this case, the text of the poem was no longer as important as the intonations of the spoken words. In this way, the music of the French language could be preserved. When the poem’s original is compared with Tomo Taškausko’s translation into Lithuanian, it is clearly apparent how different their sounds are. If this section of the cycle had been created for the Lithuanian translation, the music would undoubtedly have been entirely different. It would inevitably have been shaped by the music of the Lithuanian language.
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine Et nos amours Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne La joie venait toujours après la peine Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure Les jours s’en vont je demeure Under the Mirabeau Bridge the Seine flows And our loves Must this remind me The joy always came after sorrow Let the night come, let the hour sound The days pass, I remain
These examples from the article’s author’s creative practice are only a small fragment of the immeasurable diversity of a composer’s work with texts. All creative experiences are highly individual; it is difficult to systematize them, because each time they are different. Yet when working with poetic texts, it is essential to pay attention to their ever-renewed distinctiveness, specificity, and the general laws of language, of which in this case the most important is an awareness of the musicality of a particular language. This can be reduced to at least an elementary knowledge of the grammar, syntax, and phonetics of a foreign language, which will help the author of a vocal work seek a more perfect accord between music and word.
WORD TRANSLATIONS
Circumstances also bring one into contact with very distant languages, rarely used in creative work. One such language is Aramaic, to which the author had to turn when writing the requiem “Kaddish,” dedicated to the memory of a Jewish friend. Assistance was sought from transliteration specialists, who helped him understand the words of the unknown language, their pronunciation, and other linguistic nuances essential in such a case. In the creative process, the emphasis was placed not on the words themselves but on their overall sound and on features of Jewish music known earlier: a distinctive Oriental coloration, modes, and harmony. Lithuanian intonations are no longer present in “Kaddish,” while those that prevail are stylistically close to elements found in other works by the author of this article—in form, instrumentation, and rhythm. If someone attempted to translate the Aramaic text into Lithuanian and fit the syllables to the existing melody, they would suffer a painful failure—the sound of another language would clash very sharply with Aramaic, and the best solution would be to create an entirely new “Kaddish” for a new Lithuanian text. There is no doubt that, in terms of intonation, this new work would have nothing in common with the old hymn. It is likely that language strongly influences melodic writing, and not only that.
An entirely different practice connects composers with texts in Latin. In a language now used only in certain fields and spheres, composers find for the ideas of their works not merely individual, concrete words, but also the symbolism, codes, and signs of the language, and finally the specific
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sound of the language itself, which affects the listener not like other living languages of the world, but as a tradition, a relic, a historical mark of a particular civilization. For example, the prayer word hallelujah / alleluia, which entered the Latin lexicon from Hebrew and is used in Judaism and the Catholic Church, over the centuries acquired, alongside its concrete meaning, an intensely strong emotional content that greatly expanded the word’s original meaning. This circumstance freed composers to treat the word much more broadly and invited them to play more boldly with changing accents, vowel length, or the speed of singing the syllables. We find musical works in which only one word is sung—alleluia. We hear such a single sound-word in the final section of J. S. Bach’s solo cantata “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen” (BWV 51). Here what matters is not the specific meaning of the word but its symbolic fullness. There are many such works in the musical literature in which one word occupies an entire section.
Latin has another quality attractive to a musical work: at the same time, entirely different texts can sound in various polyphonic voices, which the listener hears not as bearers of semantic information but as messages proclaiming a certain emotional, timbral, and historical-cultural value. Thus, an incomprehensible text becomes implicit through the language of music, draws attention, and finally becomes understandable otherwise—felt through intuitions rather than grasped through concrete content. When writing music for Latin texts, one is generally guided not by a precise translation of the words (this is needed only at the beginning of the creative process), but by the linguistic qualities described here, taking into account not only philology but also the weight of cultural heritage. Thus, a composer who has mastered the craft of vocal music may hope that works sounding in his or her native language will also be correctly understood by listeners who do not know it, if the author follows the qualities of Latin described here in the light of the music of language.
THE SONG OF THE WORD
Observations about the music of language conclude with a brief self-analysis of the song “Apple Blossoms,” composed in 1968 to a triolet by Kazys Binkis of the same title from the cycle “Utos” (1920). The poem-song, with its highly musical form and economical vocabulary, was born as if in a single breath—such is the artistic power of that short poem. The aim was, probably subconsciously, to give sound to the falling of petals in two ways—through the tempo of the poet’s words and the direction of the image: we watch—they fall quietly. To reinforce the illusion of height, the entire melodic sequence was contained within a fairly large range, with small phrases recurring internally—rapid speech and pauses. The many repeated words merge into a melody of rising and falling sounds, which ends an octave higher with the same motif with which it began, only now in the major:
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11 illustration. G. Kuprevičius “Apple Blossoms,” 1968.
The song, born in the tale of spontaneous creation, required creative editing, the adjustment of proportions, correction of pause durations, and an evaluation of the possibilities of high-voice technique. In the creative process of a professionally working composer, emotion and pragmatism certainly do not obstruct one another. On the contrary, they bring the artistic element into sharper focus and give a musical opus compositional completeness. The alliance of reason and feeling enables one to move more freely and precisely toward the fullness of the initial idea’s realization.
CONCLUSION
The history of the humanities has entered a qualitatively new era. No serious research in various fields will have a continuation if those conducting it do not view the diversity of the changing world, and the conflicts and peaces taking place within it, from a broader, hermeneutic perspective. A close collaboration among scholars from various fields—humanities researchers, cultural scholars, and art historians—offers a great and alluring prospect, enabling many phenomena that generate doubt or invite debate to be viewed more calmly and interdisciplinarily. True, the fellowship of a musicologist and a linguist may seem unusual and inconvenient, but it can be overcome through courage and openness. The successes of such collaboration have long existed in the sciences of physics and mechanics, biology and anthropology, archaeology and chemistry. A practicing musician may be mistaken in seeing such pairs or ensembles of scholars, yet an orchestra, too, consists of very different instruments, and together they create an impressive and harmonious sound. It is difficult for a composer to understand the components of a word or language as specialists understand them. And vice versa. Even in theater studies, misunderstandings can be seen when a review of a musical evaluates only the direction, the actors’ work, and the scenography, saying not a word about the music. There have also been opposite examples—the music once heard in drama performances was professionally assessed by the writer Balys Sruoga…
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This article has surveyed the topic of the music of language—an encouragement to oneself and one’s colleagues to penetrate the embrace of creative mysteries more boldly and with senses opened more widely. After all, the level of scholarly apparatus in Lithuania is genuinely high enough for such ventures. There can never be too many of them.
