Ellen Shaw

music theorist

Abstract

Several recent studies have explored how text stress relates to musical meter in popular song, particularly as it has to do with accent (BaileyShea 2021), anticipatory syncopation (Temperley 2018), metrical and prosodic dissonance (Biamonte 2014; Eron 2024), flow (Duinker 2021), and metric flexibility (Murphy 2023). In art song, the relationship is typically understood in terms of declamation, that is, how the rhythms of poetry are rhythmically transformed to music (Krebs 2010; Malin 2010). Malin’s declamatory schemas, which catalogue the placement of stressed syllables of text according to the beats of the notated measure on which they fall, are particularly effective at capturing expressive and form-functional patterning of declamation within individual songs, as well as declamatory norms and idiosyncrasies across multiple songs. We argue that declamatory schemas are similarly useful in the analysis of popular song, where they can also facilitate comparison of declamation across different performances of the same song.

We showcase some particularly common schemas, explore a range of form-functional declamatory strategies (declamatory expansion at points of formal closure, schema pairing, and declamatory refrains), and consider three complications that arise in the application of declamatory schemas to popular song (anticipatory syncopation, ambiguity in the lineation of lyrics, and ambiguity in text stress). We conclude with a comparative analysis of declamation in Joni Mitchell’s 1969 and 2022 recordings of “Both Sides Now,” arguing that Mitchell’s freer approach to declamation in the later recording is part of her broader absorption of jazz (Whitesell 2008; Powers 2024).