3. Words into Music
by Gene Lees
THE LANGUAGE of a people, and some times even differing dialects, act as a powerful force in shaping a nation's music, even its instrumental music.
The German language is full of regular stresses and emphases; so is much of German music. Mexican Spanish has the pattering sound of triplets about it; so does a good deal of Mexico's mu sic. Consider how the rhythmic feeling of "The Mexican Hat Dance" ac cords with the way Mexicans speak Spanish.
The influence of language on music was brought home to me in the 1960s when I began translating the Brazilian Portuguese lyrics of Antonio Carlos Jobim. I found that English lyrics would fit comfortably into the music of a ballad (the samba cancao, to use the Brazilian term) because there is a stressed -unstressed structure in Brazilian speech--which is quite different, by the way, in rhythm and even tonal character from that of Portugal.
At more rapid tempos, English usually becomes awkward in conjunction with Brazilian melodies. Take Sergio Mendes' recording of "Chauve Chuva": The English line "constant is the rain" comes clumsily from the mouth, tripping over the rhythm of the music. "The Girl from Ipanema" utterly lost her swing in Norman Gimbel's English translation, partly be cause the three -syllable phrase "tall and tan" was forced onto a melodic phrase that originally had five syllables. The more idiomatically Brazilian a song is in speech character and therefore in musical character the more difficult it is to fit English lyrics to it.
In 1963, I began a working collaboration and friendship with the French songwriter, singer, and film actor Charles Aznavour. Helping him pre pare for his first Broadway appearance, I translated about a dozen of his songs. Some of them were easy to render into English, like "J'aime Paris au mois de Mai." Its structure is rather like that of an American song, with a markedly stressed but uneven rhythmic character to the words. In English the title became "Paris Is at Her Best in May" (partly to poke fun at one of the loveliest of American songs, "April in Paris," since anyone who has lived there knows that April in Paris is usually soggy and dismal). The English title contains the same number of syllables as the French; but more importantly, the weak and strong syllables conform to those of the original line.
Others of Aznavour's songs were difficult, however, particularly "Que c'est triste Venise"--which became "Venice Blue." I was always unhappy with my English lyric for the song.
Last year when Aznavour said he in tended to re-record it, I totally re wrote it as "How Sad Venice Can Be." The new lyric is a considerable improvement, but I still am not content.
The problem is not a matter of meaning; true translation is ultimately impossible, and all that one can do is to understand the emotional components of a song and then reconstruct them with the images, symbols, and rhymes of the adopted language.
Many of his songs were written in alexandrines, the meter of classical French poetry and the verse dramas of Racine and Corneille. An alexandrine is a line of iambic hexameter-six iambs, each containing a weak beat followed by a strong one. Thus each line contains twelve syllables.
The music of "Que c'est triste Venise" conforms to that structure of iambic hexameter, so the English lyric must be in alexandrines as well. The first two lines of the more recent translated version read: "How sad Venice can be when you return alone/ and find a memory in every paving stone." One sees that these lines seem very long and "wordy" in English, a language in which iambic pentameter has usually been considered the longest practicable graceful line. It is the rhythm of Shakespeare and, incidentally, of American blues.
Repeated experiments by poets, including Pope and Dryden, have established that alexandrines are awkward in English. They work quite felicitously in Latin languages, however, and especially in French. One reason for this is that French utilizes certain devices of articulation that make it possible to speak smoothly at higher speeds than are natural to English. For example, the French leave terminal letters such as s, t, and d silent when the following word begins with a consonant. But when the following word begins with a vowel, the terminal con sonant is sounded, in the device called "liaison." This prevents the collision of consonants-the bane of an English or American lyricist's professional life.
In the song "All the Way," Sammy Cahn wrote the clumsy phrase "tallest tree," which presents a singer with the unhappy alternative of singing "talles' tree" or "tallest (short and artificial pause) tree." (Frank Sinatra, whose sensitivity to problems of articulation is one of the keys to his genius as a singer, chose the latter of the two evils.) French is a comparatively unstressed language, the syllables emerging (when well spoken) in a smooth, even flow. It has a balanced and somewhat detached quality that is oddly parallel to the educated Frenchman's Cartesian way of thinking. Whether the structure of a given language underlies the way its people think or whether, conversely, in the course of a country's evolution, the way its people think determines the nature and form of its language, I do not know. No doubt a reciprocal process occurs. I am convinced that the language, and the songs growing out of it, that a composer hears as a child will deeply influence the way he later writes instrumental music. Of course, although a child hears far more popular and folk than classical music, he may later submit to strong foreign influences, as in the cases of Berlioz, Franck, and Delius.
Debussy's opposition to German influences in French music may have had more to do with an aesthetic ultimately shaped by the character of his language than even he knew. (We do know how strong the effect of a few French poets, including Mallarme, was in his thinking.) Whatever the throughout his life time to form his personality, his music is remarkably similar to the French language in its evenness, balance, and subtlety. Bartok's music, to cite an opposite extreme, favors a disjointed rhythm in which a stressed short note often precedes an unstressed long one, a characteristic of the Hungarian language, consequently of its folksongs, and eventually of Bartok's (not to mention Kodaly's) style.
Perhaps the failure of this country's "melting pot" goal of integration of many peoples stems from the mis taken assumption that there are no inherent differences between the thought processes of various ethnic groups. The achievement of that national goal is more likely to grow out of learning to value what is different in the cultural experience of others than in denying the existence of these differences. We have made small steps in this direction when a white audience appreciates John Coltrane or Benny Carter and a young black drummer is lovingly immersed in the music of Debussy or Ravel.
If even classical music, deliberate and planned in conception and execution, lends insight into a nation, popular music offers a much more immediate access to this understanding. I will begin to examine this point in the next issue.
-------------
(High Fidelity, Apr. 1977)
Also see:
The New Releases--The Perilous Path to Soprano Superstardom; Heroic Voices from Pioneer Days
Culshaw at Large--The U.N. Day Concerts