A Moral Little Tale

I’ve been reading through Charles Adams’ How to Put a Melody on Paper which has some interesting techniques for setting text, besides its main intent of teaching a beginner the fundamentals of writing music. An experienced composer, especially one who has written for voice, would no doubt start with a reasonably good setting of a text. But for those of us, like me, who lacks both experience and innate talent, having a step-by-step guide is essential. Adams’ techniques are just that: take a text, figure out the accents, match the accents to a rhythmic beat of quarter notes, modify the note durations to highlight the significant words and meaning of the text, and set the pitches to yield a singable vocal line that compliments the text and the rhythm.

Taking the opening sentence from Lord Dunsany’s “A Moral Little Tale” (from Fifty-one Tales , published in 1914), I take a shot at using Adams’ methods. The text is prose, but Dunsany tends to write with a hint of poetic rhythm, which I think may lend itself to a musical setting.



The initial setting deals only with matching the text accents to musical accents; the oscillation between G and E is meaningless at this point. It is in duple time because triple time has a strong dance connotation. “Labored” in bar 6 slows down the flow of the tune, so the half notes were converted to eighths.



The last phrase, “his was a zealous life”, has an accent mismatch: “His” should be on a stronger beat, so it is shifted to the downbeat of the next measure. The resulting rest in bar 7 sets apart the final phrase and, I think, gives it a bit of emphasis. And to give it a somber, plain, and unadorned feel, the notes are shifted to the super tonic except for a lone E, all sung staccato to remove any lingering sense of lyricism.



The “labored” melisma is given a melodic line that climbs up a tritone, then falls to the dominant. “Principles” is emphasized by giving it sixteenth notes and reducing “he” to an eighth.



The start of the middle phrase descends down from A to “principles”, and “labored” is changed to not reach tonic (no resolution for the Puritan), drop down to an E-flat, and settle on the sub-dominant instead of dominant.



The first phrase climbs step by step to an initial climax on “Puritan”, then peaks on “dance” preceded by a strong leap from the secondary dominant. “Wrong” is emphasized with an E-flat, a sort of frowning minor that contrasts with the happier leap to “dance”.