SOUND PATTERNS

Which comes first--the chicken or the egg?

It's possible to write the music first, and then put words to it, but since taking the trouble to choose a text, leading with the words seems a good idea. Since you've analyzed it for rhythms and inflections, you are ready to begin notating it. There are many ways this can be accomplished; here are some suggestions:

• Convert the long and short rhythms of the words into musical rhythms. Do not worry about meter and barlines at this point...the rhythms only need to be approximate.

  

  The word "sinks" was given a shorter value followed by a rest to accommodate the hard syllable "k".

• Place barlines at key words (or words that seem to take a natural stress).

  

• Figure out a meter which might accommodate the rhythms and barlines you created. Of course, you can play with the rhythms, adding and/or subtracting values to make it more logical. You do not have to have one meter only all the way throughout...changing meters can add to the conversational quality of the text.

  

• Add pitches to the rhythms from the system you created, following the natural rise and fall of the inflections of the words (be sure you know the range of the voice you are writing for). Here is what it looks like with the phrygian hexachord selected in the previous section on pitch vocabulary:

  

• Sing what you have written thus far, and make any corrections you'd like. The creation of melody is an on-going process...keep refining it until you have something that works for you.
  
  
• Consider text-painting. There are certain words that cry out for specific musical treatments. In the example being developed, the word "sinks" can be dropped even lower (sinking), and the word "burning" can have an explosion of notes (like flames).