The tempo you choose for your song will be also at least partially determined
by how easy it is to sing your lyrics. If your song is rhythmically clumsy, a
fast tempo may tie knots in your tongue trying to get them all in. Think of
Shakespeare and his constant use of iambic pentameter. Not only do his
words sound nice to the ear, but they’ve been easy for performers to repeat
without fear to being tongue-tied for more than 400 years. If you want a rapid-
fire, one-syllable-per-eighth or sixteenth note lyric, you have to be extra care-
ful that the words are easy to pronounce and sing together. It’s a good idea to
experiment with a metronome by singing or speaking the lyric against various
tempo settings.Fewer words to a song generally pose fewer problems, but the challenge is to
phrase them in an interesting way against the rhythm. You can stretch short
spoken phrases against slow musical phrases easily drawing short words out
as Hank Williams and Patsy Cline did in their music, or by using long pauses
between phrases like Leonard Cohen sometimes does. In songs with few words,
the way you deliver your lines — or the way your singer delivers your lines —
is just as important as the words used.Building rhythm ..................................................................................
We discuss how you can build rhythm around a lyrical phrase in Chapter 4.
Now it’s time to explore that a little more. Take a phrase from Henry Purcell’s
Dido and Aeneas:Thy hand, Belinda! Darkness shades me,If you were to break it up simply by spoken rhythmic accents, it would look
like Figure 17-1.^^ ^ - ^ - ^ - ^ -
Thy hand, Be lin da--! Dark -ness shades me,
Figure 17-1:
Adding
accent
marks to
Henry
Purcell’s
lyrics to
indicate
rhythm.222 Part IV: Orchestration and Arrangement