by Mark Simos
Sound and Sense: Facets, World, and Structure
There are infinite aspects to explore in connections between the “real” sensory and referential world and creative work we do with the facets. I’ve bounded discussion of these connections with the simplifying process notions of casting and framing. When you work from story, theme, project, or narrative to musical or lyrical material for the song, you’re casting. When you look for real-world or narrative associations for musical material, or for the sonic or just ambiguous aspects of lyric material, you’re framing. A 360° approach challenges you to work across all facets in making these connections. Now, we see that in casting and framing, we can work in not only direct ways but also more surprising ways, through ironic reversals: “half-twists” between theme and emotion and material in one, or all, facets.
As a songwriter, I’m intrigued with deeper, even philosophical questions raised by these connections. I’ve claimed everything in the song means. Yet clearly, lyrics, melody, harmony, and rhythm each carry meaning in distinctive ways. What kind of thematic material lends itself most readily to melodic vs. harmonic, modal, or rhythmic associations? Here’s a speculative account of how this might work, grounded in recognizing a deep asymmetry in ways we work with language (via the lyrics facet) vs. music (via other facets).
Imagine a “criss-cross” between sense and sound aspects of lyric vs. musical facets, and a polarity in how these facets connect, respectively, to the World (content) and to structure:
Lyrics connect to the world through sense: to structure through sound.
Musical facets connect to the world through sound: to structure through sense.
To elaborate: referential aspects of lyrics draw us toward the sensory world, while sound aspects of lyrics take on their strongest role for songwriting in connection to structural effects, both within the lyric itself and in relation to other facets.
This insight runs counter to a naïve notion: that great lyrics come from “word painting” or direct imitation of real-world effects with lyric sounds. Such onomatopoetic relationships certainly occur in lyrics, but are tangential rather than essential. Your primary concern with lyric sounds should be patterning them to resonate against accompanying structures in melody, chords, and rhythm. This both links lyric writing to some aspects of poetry and highlights ways in which the arts differ.
Conversely, for a songwriter’s purposes, musical materials take on meaning, and perhaps even emotion, primarily via self-referential associations and resonances created by structural effects. These “sense” aspects of a chord progression, for example—whether lying in a functional harmonic vocabulary or more impressionistic modal palette—give it meaning in the musical world and its reflection in structure. This insight runs counter to another tendency—to correlate musical aspects too literally to narrative or emotional associations. To the extent that music does relate directly to the sensory world, it may be primarily—and somewhat paradoxically—through sound aspects. As with lyric word painting, these are special effects, best used sparingly: an occasional melodic line that soars like a bird in the sky; a rhythmic riff evoking a heartbeat.
Consider this tidy scheme of symmetries an area of ongoing research, a jumping-off point for inquiry through your own experience and creative investigations. I include it here mainly as a cautionary note against too enthusiastic an embrace of only surface elements of a 360° songwriting approach.
I’ve placed strong emphasis on the sound aspects of lyrics, the nonharmonic possibilities of chords, the potential to work on songs in an “impressionistic” way, prior to a thematic focus. While this emphasis is perhaps a corrective to overly “rationalized” explanations and prescriptions for songwriting, we can take it too far. Simmering every note and chord into a direct sensory study could lead us to an artificial, overly illustrative kind of “tone poem” songwriting.
We can avoid such pitfalls by cultivating respect for the power of structural patterns themselves to carry a kind of meaning. Trust that writing to a rhyme scheme or a melodic phrase structure is more than a display of craft and technique; it contributes actively to the emotion and meaning of the song. I’m hesitant, though, to explain this by searching for too direct a link between the meanings carried by structures and referential meanings in the world. Let the structures do their own work.
CONCLUSION
From a Song to the World
One big lesson of 360° songwriting is that you don’t always know what the song is “about” when you start. Strategies of song seed catching and starting songs from any direction mean the material itself can lead us to themes and content to write and sing about—or (and you’re doing well if it feels like this) what the song itself asks us to write it into being about.
In the songwriting strategies presented in this book, you can apply this not only to initial song seed catching, but potentially to any compass move, such as setting from one facet to another. You can treat such moves as assignments to generate material afresh, such as writing a new melody to a lyric line, or finding new words to a melody, aligning the material emotionally as best you can. Alternatively, you can treat this work as a kind of bricolage, collage, or quilt-making: searching your (oh so efficiently compiled!) lists of song seeds for the facet of interest, and letting these collide serendipitously with the material you’re matching to—in surprising, maybe even ironic ways. Working with counterpoint and irony further extends this discovery-based approach to songwriting. Compositional techniques that rely on “chance operations” (to borrow a phrase from John Cage, a most “un-caged” composer) allow and invite mismatches and ironic juxtapositions—and through these happy accidents, perhaps unexpected new truths.
I believe certain human truths, vital to our future, can only be conveyed through song—and that the songs can tell us what to sing. It’s this songwriter’s crazy faith that these connections are there to be experienced, in different ways, with every facet—and that every pathway expands our scope and voice as writers. Doing this work, we’ll be trying to answer the big questions: Why write songs? Why write a song about this? Why a song about this? Wrestling with these questions expands us outward—from the only songs we can write, to songs only we can write. Why? Write songs! Welcome to our proud tribe of songwriters: comrades to creative writers and composers, but with our own work to do.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Simos, associate professor in songwriting at Berklee College of Music, is a renowned songwriter, composer and tunesmith, teacher, and writer. Over four-plus decades, Mark’s songs and “tunes from imaginary countries” have stretched musical boundaries with innovative melodies and harmonies and intricately crafted lyrics, bringing a contemporary sensibility to “neo-traditionalist” forms. Over one hundred of Mark’s compositions have been recorded by artists, including Americana supergroup Alison Krauss and Union Station, Ricky Skaggs, Del McCoury, and Laurie Lewis. He’s co-written with artists/writers such as Australian rock icon Jimmy Barnes, Catie Curtis, and the Infamous Stringdusters’ Andy Hall. He’s featured on many recordings as fiddler and guitar accompanist, and has recorded an acclaimed song-cycle album, Crazy Faith, and four albums of original and traditional fiddle music.
At Berklee, Mark creates innovative curriculum in 360° songwriting, collaboration, guitar techniques for songwriters, and tunewriting, and leads Berklee’s American Old-Time Ensemble. He also continues to perform and teach at workshops, camps, festivals, and retreats worldwide.
1. Diane Warren NPR interview with Neil Conan, Talk of the Nation. “Insider Secrets to Great Songwriting.” June 21, 2010. Interview archived at npr.org.
2. Of course, these days I might just snap a photo of the woman as my reminder. Then there’s no written phrase to mistake later for a lyric seed. But I also might not remember why I thought the image was a good starting point for a song.
3. Providing just the title or hook for a song is valued as a creative contribution. Even in contexts outside of formal co-writes, I�
�ve heard it can be valued as at least 10 percent of the writers’ credit.
4. In this book, I’ll generally use “theme” with this sense of content or subject, rather than a musical theme, as used in a theme-and-variation form. I’ll use the term “motive” for the latter concept.
5. Spiller, Henry. Focus: Gamelan Music of Indonesia (Focus on World Music Series) 2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 2008.
6. This section builds on seminal work by Pat Pattison, as detailed in books such as Songwriting: Essential Guide to Rhyming (2nd edition, Berklee Press, 2014) and Writing Better Lyrics (2nd edition, Writer’s Digest Books, 2010).
7. In the prosodic analysis of poetry, patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables are grouped into complex systems of metric feet: iambs, trochees, anapests, dactyls, and many subtle variations. These derived originally from Greek, Latin, and later poetic forms that variously treated stress as created by intonation, emphasis, or length (that is, duration). In song lyrics, this kind of metric analysis is not as helpful. In a musical context, time signature, phrase structure, and even pulse or groove create metrical groupings against which the lyric is heard and felt.
8. The prosodic system useful in song lyrics has points of similarity with simplified systems advocated by some poetic theorists, such as the “sprung rhythm” system developed by English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
9. I remember with some embarrassment my own lesson in this, when my friend and vocal coach Piper Heisig was helping me work on lyric phrasing for my album Crazy Faith. After listening to my demos, she gently told me in one session: “Have you noticed that whenever you get to the word ‘I’ or ‘me’ in one of your lines, you hang on to the word as long as you possibly can?”
10. Of course, continued too long, even pentatonic motion can become pattern-y as the pentatonic spine becomes too audible. For example, the memorable riff from Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke” uses a modified version of such extended linear pentatonic motion as a special effect (though this example goes beyond vocal melody in the strict sense referenced here).
11. These range types are suggestive of authentic vs. plagal ranges in traditional vocal and part writing. The usage here is not completely consistent with these formal definitions.
12. This technique is different from a melodic formula prevalent in current pop writing, where a first verse is sung softly in a lower octave, and then later verses “power” the melody up a full octave. This is more a registral and arrangement-level effect than a compositional melodic change.
13. Meyerson, Harold and Ernie Harburg. Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz? Yip Harburg, Lyricist. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995.Melody
14. I say lyric rhythm because I’m describing these mappings in a songwriting context. For general composition, including instrumental writing, we’d need to consider mappings between melodic contour and any arbitrary rhythmic pattern. Here, though, we’re specifically interested in rhythmic phrases that carry a lyric. These already represent a placement of a lyric line, a string of syllables, into rhythmic form. This narrows our scope, but also makes the definitions a bit more tricky!
15. Don’t confuse these melismatic slurs with ties: visually similar notation that connects notes on the same pitch, tied across bar lines or other major metric boundaries.
16. Some aspects of this discussion introduce different terminology than standard presentations on harmony. To compare this treatment of harmonic motion with the approach used in Berklee’s jazz harmony curriculum, I recommend The Berklee Book of Jazz Harmony, by Joe Mulholland and Tom Hojnacki (Berklee Press, 2013).
17. This is an adaptation of the “48 x 48” exercise from Mick Goodrick’s The Advancing Guitarist (Hal Leonard Corp., 1987). In that book, the context is melodic improvisation on guitar, but it’s a great exercise for songwriters as well.
18. For clarity here I refer to a “sequence” rather than a “progression,” meaning a smaller unit than an entire sectional progression, analogous to the single lyric line we worked with in exercise 8.1.
19. Platonic here meaning: talk about this at a party, and that’s the kind of friend you’ll make that night….