July 8, 2007
The Questionably Quotable Quaker V Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:05 PM EST Fredric Smoler writes, “. . . in cold print, the lyrics of many of the songs look appalling. Then again, the lyrics of ‘Mama Look Sharp’ aren’t much when read on screen, without the music, and neither, for that matter, are the lyrics to Mozart and Da Ponte’s ‘Porgi, amor, qualche ristoro’ or ‘Piú docile io sono, when compared with their power when sung. I have seen Beaumarchais, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, and Sir Kenneth Clark all credited with the remark that ‘what is too silly to be said can still be sung,’ and it is true.” Let me hasten to the defense of the art of lyric writing in general, without specifically referring to the work of either Sherman Edwards or Lorenzo Da Ponte. I never saw 1776, and my grasp of Italian is limited to ordering dinner in Italian restaurants. Lyrics when read, divorced from the music, often seem banal. But that is a bit like judging a painting from a black and white photograph of it. Lyrics, after all, are written to be sung, and that has consequences. While lyricists use all the literary devices employed by poets, they are far more constrained in their choice of words. Stephen Sondheim, a master of the art if there ever was one, thinks that lyrics are the most restrictive of all literary forms. First, the reader can go back and reread a poem until he understands it; a listener must catch the words of a lyric on one go and through the ear. Thus the words have to be easily understood. Consider the line from “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” “The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.” Seeing as this line is sung by a cowboy in Oklahoma, Oscar Hammerstein originally wrote “The corn is as high as a cow pony’s eye.” But, meticulous researcher that he was, he walked over to his neighbor’s cornfield and found that the corn, in late August, is considerably higher than a cow pony’s eye. That wouldn’t have bothered him too much; Oklahoma! is a musical, after all, not an agronomy lesson. (Hammerstein didn’t let the fact that the mating season for sheep is in the autumn, not June, stop him from using the marvelous line “All the rams that chase the ewe sheep/ Are determined there’ll be new sheep/ And the ewe sheep aren’t even keeping score!” in “June is Bustin’ Out All Over.”) But the phrase “cow pony’s” did bother him. It reads fine but it doesn’t sing well. Try it, it sounds a bit like the name of some non-existent garden flower, the cowpenny. Another problem for lyricists is that the words have to sing well. Some vowel sounds open the throat—making them easy to sing loudly or at a high pitch—and some close it. The word “sweet,” for instance, no matter how apposite, just can’t be used at certain points in a song. Another problem is with notes that are to be held, such as, usually, the note at the end of a song: A lyricist can’t use words that end with a hard consonant, such as t or p. Hammerstein was convinced that the reason the song “What’s the use of Wond’rin’?” from Carousel did not enjoy the success outside the show that so wonderful a song deserves is solely because of the word on which the lyric ends: So, when he wants your kisses
You will give them to the lad,
And anywhere he leads you you will walk.
And any time he needs you,
You’ll go running there like mad.
You’re his girl and he’s your feller—
And all the rest is talk. Hammerstein knew that he was breaking a rule and that other endings were possible (You’re his girl and he’s your feller—/ That’s all you need to know). He believed, however, that rules should be tested now and then just to see if, in fact, they are breakable. As he wrote, “Sometimes you succeed and this is the way the most exciting things in the theater are done. Sometimes you fail. This time a good and sound rule slapped me down.” I have taken all my examples here from Oscar Hammerstein not because he was a great lyricist, although he certainly was. It’s because he wrote the best thing ever written on the art of writing song lyrics, “Notes on Lyrics,” that serves as an extended preface for his collected lyrics. Anyone who aspires to being a lyricist should memorize it.
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