As a vocal composer, singer and poet/librettist, I am embarking on a project to articulate the things I know about how to set text for singers. If you have any topic you’d like me to address please get in touch.

Vowels

Vowels Have Feelings

Vowels are shaped by the tongue. Where the middle of the tongue sits high in the mouth the vowels are called ‘forward’. You can see above how the tongue is shaped quite differently for the back vowels. These tongue positions gives vowels different colours and evoke different emotions.

The back vowels - oh and ooo - are naturally more mournful than the forward vowels - ee eh ih. Which are naturally happier. As you can see, ‘ah’ the tongue is the lowest forward vowel and the colour can be happy or sad.

If you play around with your voice, you'll feel it's easier to laugh on eee than it is on ooo. It's easier to wail sorrowfully on oh than it is on ih.

Of course singers train to bring joy or sorrow into all vowels and will cope - "remember me" sings Dido, conveying devastating misery on a stream of forward vowels. But, on the whole, if you want to go with the grain of vowels' inherent emotions, there it is.

So say you were setting "weep for you" and didn't have any other musical or narrative considerations, try giving the singer more to work with on "you" rather than "weep".

Beautiful Ah Vowel

The ah vowel sits well in all singers voices, pretty much through the whole range. I think it's a beautiful vowel to listen to, an emotionally expressive vowel. (Ah laughs. It cries. It sighs.) So it gives singers expressive material to work with. And singing is emotional vocal expression. If we as composers give our singers emotional vowels, we help them do their work of moving audiences. In text setting, when you are selecting which words to lengthen, think of the beautiful ah.

Multiple ah syllables in your phrases give singers the chance to create beautiful, moving lines. Importantly, in classical singing, singers lengthen the first vowel in dipthongs and tripthongs and shorten the other vowels. This means "now" will almost become "nah". So the text below is nearly all "ah" vowel.

I showed this text to Emlyn O'Regan and Bethany Hill and they both created melodies on the spot to these words. (I didn't have to write a note myself!) Hear how much ah there is, and what that does for the smoothness of the phrases. Plus bonus Emlyn did a version without the consonants so you can hear how much ah there is.

What does this mean for you? When you want something gorgeous, find a word with an "ah" vowel and give it a single, simple longish note. Trust that your singers will make it beautiful. Sometimes I listen to beautiful singers and think how simple the melodies are, how beautifully a singer will shape a long note if they are given them. I can tend to be in a hurry to put clever melodies in and have to remind myself - trust your singer to make a long ah beautiful. Helpfully the word I was setting was "lush".

The Back Vowels Are Blendy

When there's a solo in a choral piece and the rest of the choir is creating a beautiful sonic texture, the choir is often given 'ah' ‘oh’ or 'ooo' to sing. These are beautiful vowels to sing and to hear sung.

The following text might be a bit gammy in terms of meaning, but the vowels will sing beautifully

"Tonight, the light of the full moon brightens the dark full night."

Diphthongs

Dipthongs (and triphthongs) are multiple vowel sounds in a syllable. “Round’ starts on ‘ah’ moves to ‘oh’ then ‘ooo’. Diphthongs travel from more open to more closed vowels. Classical singers, fans of the open vowels, stay on the first vowel of a diphthong/triphthong as long as possible. So 'night', sung is almost nah-t, very much an 'ah' sound. This means for a classical singer, ‘night’ and ‘round’ will both be mostly ‘ah’ and you could set them as internally rhyming words.

Vowels And Soaring Soprano Notes

For reasons to do with acoustics and space and mouths AND NOTHING TO DO WITH SINGING ABILITY it is hard for audiences to understand vowels when sopranos sing high.

To write for this, and this feels screamingly obvious, when text matters most don't set the words high. Or repeat phrases. Once in a sensible range for text, second time for heightened emotion.

I suspect too, for stratospheric moments, sopranos will appreciate either forward consonants, or no consonants at all. Singers devote their lives to singing - to coping with the realities of combining text-meaning and musical beauty. And sopranos employ vocal and performance techniques for making the text as clear as they can. Nonetheless. There it is.

A good rule of thumb is, if you’ve gone off the stave, sopranos are likely to convert the vowels into Ah. Back when I was studying singing in my twenties, my teacher thought I might be a soprano. We spent a lot of time on how to sing above the stave. She used to talk about making a foundation of Ah and then adding as much of the word’s actual vowel in as possible without compromising the tone.

But once you add a certain number of leger lines, there is a point beyond which there is simple an acoustic sound. For eg there’s no vowel on the top F of Queen Of The Night.

Consonants

Consonants are created through creating a block. Lips push together, and there’s an M. The tongue tip pushes against the teeth ridge, air builds up and then burst apart and there’s a D. There’s a whole system of classifying consonants according to which bits of the mouth are involved, whether the sound is ongoing ‘M’ ‘Sh’ or bursts ‘B’ ‘K’ and whether the vocal cords are engaged or not for eg the difference between ‘P’ and ‘B’.

Because consonants create blocks, they are challenging for students of singing. As part of the long process of studying singing, students can learn songs by removing the consonants completely and singing on the vowels. Eventually we all learn to love consonants too, without them there is no story! And we learn how to play with them and incorporate them into the performance.

How do we work with consonants for our singers?

This is so obvious it’s almost painful to write - singing is both TEXT and MUSIC. Where these two elements meet is where the magic happens, but they require slightly different things and pull singers in two different directions.

A second painfully obvious idea - singers tend to sing music with melodies. The more music is melodically driven, the more it has at its aesthetic heart not words, or even individual notes, but melodic phrases. We tend to think of beauty and elegance in melodic music in terms of smoothly managed phrases, with the syllables, words and notes inside phrases connected and shaped together into as cohesive sound as possible. In these moments the emotion of the text is delivered more through the tone of the voice and the shape of the phrase than the clarity of the text.

Singing training involves learning various techniques to smooth out the lumps and bumps inherent in spoken text to create this melodic smoothness. As you read this, countless singing teachers are shouting “LINE LINE LINE LINE LINE” to countless students around the globe. What do singers do to create this LINE? Vowels flow, Learning to ‘sing on the vowel’ helps singers create this elegant phrasing. Consonants ARE trouble. They block the airflow one way or another, and in some cases stop the sound completely. (looking at you ‘K’ and your plosive buddies), interrupting a steady smooth phrase. the use of consonants to either enhance or disrupt the flow of vocal line. Whether they are voiced or unvoiced, plosive or flowing, forward or back makes a difference to the effect.

Singers adjust words from their spoken form, lengthening out vowels, and minimising the length and intensity of consonants for the requirements of melodic phrase.. But this can lead to the frustrating situation for both singers and their audiences where singers have lovely vowels and phrasing but are incomprehensible because the clarity of consonants has been sacrificed.

And whilst audiences may swoon happily during moments of incomprehensible soaring melodic, emotional music, words as well would be better. And there are times when clarity of text matters very much. When audiences need to hear the words to understand what’s going on.

What does this mean for creating and setting text for singers? We can help with judicious consonant choice.

Thankfully not all consonants are created equal. Although all consonants involve some sort of airflow block, some consonants allow singers to maintain a continuous voiced sound and don’t interrupt line. The consonants that lend themselves to smooth lines are voiced, non-plosive and created in the front of the mouth rather than the back.

So when you want soaring emotional melodic lines, use plosive and unvoiced consonants sparingly. They are not your singer’s friend. On the other hand, when you want the audience’s attention to turn to the text and the information in the words, use these consonants for effect.

My first example is from the very melodic and emotional Dido’s Lament. You’ll notice how the consonants allow flow and phrasing. You can say these words flowing into each other, as if you are stretching chewing gum out of your mouth! When there are plosives their disruptive character is lessened - they are directly preceded or followed by flowing consonants. And then, just in the very final line, the fricative ‘f’s in “Forget my fate” give the singer some powerful opportunities for sonic punctuation.

And then for a complete contrast, the second example is from Gilbert’s Mikado. See how he has deliberately chosen disruptive percussive consonants throughout to literally chop the line up.

The third example is from master craftperson Sondheim. You can see how he uses both disruptive and flowing consonants to allow the singer to switch between a more spoken and more sung style. Notice how percussive the first two lines are. (I recommend watching Jude Dench performing this piece to see how these lines are so very text based). But then he moves to smoother consonants. Before returning to the very punctuated “next year”. It’s impossible to deliver these two words without a break in the sound. So much information about performance is contained in his consonant selection.

And of course and always, singers are skilled at creating beautiful phrases regardless of the consonants used, and will rise above insensitive writing to create a sense of line, not with sound but using what we might call performance energy. But why not make life better for our singers and select our consonants with thought?

"When I am laid, am laid in earth, may my wrongs create

No trouble, no trouble in, in thy breast

Remember me, remember me, but ah!

Forget my fate."

"To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,

In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock,

Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock,

From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!"

"Isn't it rich?

Isn't it queer?

Losing my timing this late in my career

But where are the clowns?

There ought to be clowns

Well, maybe next year"

Percussive Consonants

The PLOSIVE consonants involve a little explosion. Something movable for eg our lips closes to form an air-dam. And when enough air builds up the dam opens and out bursts a plosive consonant.

These plosives have a percussive quality, with an attack and decay (unvoiced plosives have a very short decay) like percussion instruments. This means plosive consonants are useful for crispness in songs and passages where rhythmic elements should be highlighted and the beginning of notes made as clear as possible. A bass singer in an ensemble will emulate a plucked double bass with a plosive "doo doo doo doo" rather than a non plosive, rhythmically ambiguous "loo" or "moo".

Percussive consonants allow singers to enjoy spitting out words. 'And the people who eat peppermint and puff it in your face' Gilbert's plosive P's here are a gift for the singer and their audience!

Percussive plosives are also funny. In her book How Musicals Work and How to Write Your Own, librettist Julian Woolford says 'K' is the funniest sound in the English language. "harder sounding consonants are always funnier than the softer consonants because they are more percussive".

These consonants are not naturally lyrical. They do not naturally flow. They break the line - before the consonant, there is a brief silence where the air builds up. So if you are composing soaring lines where you want lush elegant lyricism, find bits of your text with less plosives, particularly at the beginning of syllables. One of the many skills singers develop is the ability to smooth out plosives when they appear in lyrical lines, so the world will keep turning if you use them, but if you want to write songs where you set the words to fall out of singers mouth, consider the judicious application of the potent percussive plosive.

On the other hand, they can be funny, or they can pack a punch. Consider

"Paved paradise and put up a parking lot"

Even if somehow the meaning didn't matter, it

just wouldn't pack the same punch without all those plosives.

"Made mumma rice and shook in a laughing yacht"

Try it. Your mouth aint gonna like it.

The Tongue In Vowels and Consonants

Emlyn (hubby) is a noble baritone. Not a bass baritone but a rich lower baritone with thrilling oaky baritone quality. The latest piece I have for him, the top notes are Es. Which are generally the highest notes he likes for performing - reliable for him and exciting for his audience. Three Es in this song.

Now this varies from singer to singer but I know Emlyn finds the "ee" vowel best for his top notes. I've had tenors tell me they like the "eh" of egg and sops tell me "ah". Although I was a contralto, in my 20s my teacher thought I was a sop and because I struggled at the top of a soprano range, we devoted a lot of time considering how to mix and alter vowels, trying to find a good and free sound up top. This has given me an appreciation for the importance of which vowels to set for top notes. Ask your singers what they like. I don’t know any singer who likes back vowels for their high notes. The tongue position just makes it hard to sing top notes.

Emlyn's words for his top notes in this song are "sea" "dream" and "seize". All "ee" vowels. All set up with good space to breathe before hand, good launching notes to move from, not too long and nice and loud. High voices can float their top notes, but it's cruel to ask low voices to sing high notes quietly. But he didn't have the same quality on "dream" he had on the other notes. I realized the "r" in "dream" can pull the tongue back.

I rewrote the text, replacing "dream" with "see" because "s" has the tongue way forward. This was the only change we made and he sang the new text with glorious ease. There you go! Vowels matter up the very top but so do the consonants that come before them. Consonants where the tongue sits forward in the mouth can be very helpful. I think this is particularly important for lower voices, to respect that the singers are already working to stay vocally free, and to help rather than hinder this work.

The Way Words Work - Accented and Unaccented Syllables

English is made up of accented and unaccented syllables. The syllables we accent tend to be louder and higher in pitch than the unaccented ones. Also, and this is cool - linguists call English a 'stress-timed language'. This means, in speech, we adjust the length of our non accented syllables to fit the spaces between our accented syllables, so that our accented syllables fall the same distance from each other, ie on the beat. This is the grain of our spoken language.

SETTING THIS IN THE RHYTHM

For vocal composers, time spent sitting with the text, finding this grain, finding the accented syllables, and seeing how this might map onto beats and bars is going to add to a feeling of naturalness for your singers and their audiences. In poetry written to meter, the poet has done much of this work already. But in less metered text, there is more discovery to be done!

We have a whole hierarchy in music of musical accents. First beat of the bar vs any other notes. The beat half way through a bar. Then any note on a beat compared to off beat etc. If you want your text to be clear as crystal for the audience and to fall out of the singer’s mouth, go through your text and figure out the accents, and line them up with the accents in the time signatures you’re using.

A Reason To Ignore This

When textual clarity matters, it makes sense to set unaccented syllables off the beat and lower in pitch than accented syllables. This maps onto the time-stressed nature of spoken English and the use of the low pitched neutral vowel in unaccented syllables. But niggling in the back of my mind, is the reality that many melodic phrases have unaccented syllables that are pitched higher than the accented syllables.

I've come across a great example of this in some folk songs, when the penultimate note of the phrase is above the final note of the phrase, allowing for a cadentialesque tension and resolution that you'd expect to find at the end of a phrase. The higher second last note means the melody lands on the final note from above.

Now textually, the second last note is likely to be on an unaccented syllable. This high second last note means the musical needs pull against the grain of the spoken text, turning what would be a throw away spoken syllable into a musical event. But I'm going to propose that this melodic moment is such a deep musical truth, and given it turns up in folk music and has withstood the stringent requirements of surviving aural tradition, that it's not only perfectly singable and understandable, but gives the singer some material to work with, to build and resolve tension and ARRIVE at the final note/syllable of the phrase.

I think, composing with this shape, in a way that is helpful for our singers, we can write the phrase to ensure we give the final note a sense of being a destination note, with enough length and harmonic/textural weight to support the text.

Also I think it's important to take care to resolve from an unaccented to an accented syllable. It reminds me of suspensions and the need to resolve to a consonance - the tension of this device comes in emphasising the unaccented syllable prior to the final accented syllable of the phrase. The folk song Once I Had A Sweetheart uses this second last note in every phrase. You can hear below how different the spoken text and the sung text are.

Singing Unaccented Syllables

Because accented syllables fall at regular intervals in speech, we adjust the length of non accented syllables to fill the spaces between them using the neutral vowel - schwa - for our unaccented syllables. The neutral vowel earns its name because it's made with a neutral position by the movable articulatory organs. It's easy for the mouth to move into and out of quickly. Making it the perfect vowel for the job of being putty in the gaps between the accented syllables.

The neutral vowel is softer, lower in pitch and lacking energy relative to the accented vowels, so the quality of the tone is unaccented, reassuring the listener - yes this is indeed unaccented.

The relevance for vocal composers is this: singers do not sing their vowels exactly as we speak them. Singers are doing several things with words when they sing, they must communicate the text but they must also create musical sounds, where tone, resonance , phrasing etc matter. This means singers sing a slightly different version of English than we speak.

Singers can spend years learning how to produce their vowels in such a way that the quality of their voice sounds the same on each vowel. If you want a long and detailed discussion of this, check out the magnificent singwise.com . In singing, the unaccented neutral vowel, so important to our spoken language, is usually altered by singers, to ensure the unaccented syllables form part of a cohesive musical tone.

The very thing that makes the neutral vowel useful in speech, its modest and humble tone, is altered in singing to ensure every note sounds equally resonant and beautiful. Often the neutral vowel is sung as an ‘ah’. This musical requirement pulls against the flow of spoken language. Of course, singers learn how to navigate this, and are experts at finding ways to disguise that the neutral vowel has been altered from their audience's experience, so that audiences don't notice and can still understand the words clearly.

As vocal composers, we can help our singers with text clarity, by being aware of how we compose to make it easy for our singers to de-emphasise unaccented syllables. Lowering pitch is an easy way, but obviously not by an interestingly large or chromatic interval. Staying on the same pitch as the previously accented syllable works well too, or being part of a moving scalic passage, where the melody is travelling to the next accented syllable. Avoiding long notes or melisma on what would be spoken neutral vowels will also be greatly appreciated by singers.

Interestingly, although this discussion started by saying in spoken English the unaccented syllables will expand as required to space out the accented syllables, musically length gives accent. So, this might mean giving accented syllables more time in vocal music than we would in speech will help draw the ear to the accented notes.

Or Do The Complete Opposite

I've been thinking about Over The Rainbow. This song goes against what I’ve been saying about text setting accented syllables. The highest notes in the phrases are often unaccented syllables.

some WHERE over the rainBOW way UP high there's A land that I heard OF once in a luLAby.

Just to be clear, I'm not complaining! Obviously this beautiful enduring classic works just fine.

I have two thoughts on this. Firstly, I mentioned in a previous post the pattern I've found in some folk songs, of the higher second last note of a phrase, heightening tension that resolves downward onto the final note. I feel like this dynamic is at play here, applied throughout the phrases. In fact, this movement of high and tense unaccented syllable resolving to a lower accented syllable is used so frequently it creates the momentum of the whole song.

My second thought is that the idea that the energy and power in the voice increases as the pitch rises generally maps onto classical singing. However, jazz style can flip this, with singers idiomatically delivering higher notes with a lighter touch than lower notes. (not to say jazz singers can't sing high notes loudly, and classical singers can't back off on high notes. Of course they can. And do. It's more about stylistic interpretation.)

Before composing for the Wizard Of Oz Harold Arlen spent time in NYC writing music for Harlem night club Cotton Club. I'd say he cut his chops working with jazz singers and this shows in the text setting.

Such a beautiful song, and I loved that it made me think about why it works.

George Orwell’s warning

Unaccented syllables are an essential part of text. Songs breathe through respecting the unaccented syllables. I loved this rant from George Orwell in his novel 1984 on what happens to language when people remove unaccented syllables.

"In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker's mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words — goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joycamp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others — were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous.

And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further."

You have been warned.

Poetry That Sings

Selecting Poems That Sing Well

Stephen Sondheim, who certainly has a way with words, writes beautifully about poetry versus lyrics. He says poetry is designed to stand on its own as a complete piece. It is a written art form where the reader can control the pace at which they experience the words and ideas. Lyrics in contrast need music, and the composer and performing artists control the pace at which the listener experiences the text. This means poetry can be much denser than lyrics. On the page, lyrics can seem thin and repetitive. [And I will always love you/I will always love you/you] [Hallelujah/Hallelujah/Hallelujah/Hallelujah/Hallelujah]

Stephen is writing as a lyricist/composer but his point is useful for all composers in selecting and setting text. We need not be scared of text that looks light on paper. But we are right to be wary of rich poetry. However marvelous it is. It's a poem! If, for some reason, we are working with poetry thick with ideas what can we do? I think using music to comment on every meaning and device we find in the text is going to end up cluttered, clumsy and tedious. On the other hand, composing with deliberately anemic and apologetic musical touches, to allow the poetry to speak for itself begs the question why bother to set the text to music at all?

I think, if we are required to set rich poetry we need to find ways to slow the rate of transmission down, so audiences can take in the text. This may not necessarily mean using a slow musical tempo. A slow tempo won't necessarily increase text comprehension. In conversation we speak at between 120 - 150 words per minute. This means a slow musical tempo delivers the words at a rate far from their natural, spoken pace. Slow music creates strong emotional evocations that may not support the meaning of the text. It's very effective - we wouldn't want a singer rushing through When I Am Laid In Earth- but it's very strong. Unless you want a marathon song, slowing the tempo down also means you can't get through much text. [When I am laid in earth/may my wrongs create no trouble in thy breast/Remember me but ah forget my fate] is the entire text of that aria which comes in at about 2'30'.

One option for working with a poem thick with meaning is to judiciously select only some of the text. Would your librettist continue speaking to you? Can you reduce the rate at which the text is coming at the audience by spreading the poem over a song cycle? Adding space between phrases gives audiences' brains time to catch up on words. I've borrowed this idea from public speaking, where pauses are deliberately employed to increase audience comprehension. Repetition and elongation of key words/phrases are useful too. Repetition of longer sections - phrases or entire verses with slightly different text highlighted may give the audience the ability to discover the different layers of meaning in the text.

Ideally, we can set text that yearns for music. I recently set a poem by Sara Teasdale and I think her true strength is in lyrics rather than poetry. I thought this text - and this might sound obvious but it's the feel of both the vowels and the consonants - was beautiful to sing. It has what the food scientists call 'mouth feel'. Also the ideas seem to me to be simple and just as they appear on first hearing - as far as I read it, it doesn't strike me as dense with nuanced and subtle layers of meaning. So, I don't rate it as a rich poem, but it is GORGEOUS to work with as text to set to music.

Old Tunes - Sara Teasdale

As the waves of perfume, heliotrope, rose,

Float in the garden when no wind blows,

Come to us, go from us, whence no one knows;

So the old tunes float in my mind,

And go from me leaving no trace behind,

Like fragrance borne on the hush of the wind.

but in the instant the airs remain

I know the laughter and the pain

Of times that will not come again.

I try to catch at many a tune

Like petals of light fallen from the moon,

Broken and bright on a dark lagoon.

But they float away--for who can hold

Youth, or perfume or the moon's gold

Some Poetry Quirks

Text setting a sonnet? Find the volta. The Volta is a change, a plot twist, so you’ll probably want to reflect that in the music.

Some sonnets (and other poems) use enjambment. This is where phrases travel through the line breaks, with the commas (and breaths) in the middle of the lines. Don’t panic.

A good rule of thumb is - break where the commas are - commas are for breathing. But there is still a spine running down the right hand side of your poem, which may have rhyming patterns. The words in this second spine could be brought out, through height and/or length say.

I think you’ll like working with text with two spines instead of one. Here’s an excerpt of my setting of The Storm, with enjambment on some of the lines, but not all, to make for an interesting challenge.

The Storm

by William Barnes

The raving storm is rife, and where a beam
Of sunlight pierces through the misty cloud,
The spreading waters of the river gleam
Below the ruff'ling wind that roars aloud
Among the writhing saplings, lowly bow'd
With wildly fitful fury, till they seem
To sweep the ground, while trickling waters stream
Adown their green-ribb'd sides. The cattle crowd

Before the weatherbeaten hedge, and man
Below some roof that rocks above his head
Seeks shelter from the heavy rolling blast:

And twitt'ring birds all shield them where they can,
Below the dripping tree or broad-eav'd shed,
Until the fury of the storm is past.

And Read It Out Loud

It helps if you love text. Morten Lauridsen says "I admire poetry so much. I read it every day; there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t read poems, I encourage my students to steep themselves in this because it’s so enriching on so many different levels." I think that's it. I think for composers, we could not only read but read aloud. How do the words feel spoken? Are they wonderful?

Working With Voices

Legislating Breaths

Singers, like all wind players need time to breathe in.

If music doesn't legislate breathing space, singers will do their best to take unobtrusive breaths where they can. But it may give their audiences a sense of being ill at ease. Rushed inhalation is not something calm people do. It's something people do who are anxious or have a sudden fright.

So you risk two things if you don't give your singers comfortable breathing spaces. Firstly your piece may creating feelings of anxiety in their audience. And this won't just be from feeling sympathy for the singer's inadvertent portrayal of anxiety. When audiences are engaged with a singer's performance, they breathe with the singer. This process is called ‘entrainment’. So the breathing you write for the singer is the same breathing you write for their audience.

Secondly singers are people too. If they have to breathe quickly through a song, their bodies may become physically anxious. That's just bad writing. Singers need to be at ease and in control. Even if you want them to portray anxiety - trust their ability to act and give them enough air to keep a cool head!

Not every breath needs to be long. Singers can take short "top up" breaths between longer breaths. Often it’s the second last breath before a huge phrase that matters.

Singers spend years working on these things. They will cope and make the best of it. But why not keep it classy for singer and audience?

A Quick Note On Registers

Voices have registers, a bit like a clarinet.

Unlike clarinets, where these registers sit vary between voice types. Talk to the singers you are composing for. They’ll show you where their voices change.

For some singers, singing music that spends a long time on the ‘breaks’ or ‘passagios’ can tire their voices. For some singers, their tone changes colour in the different registers, which may impact on what text you want to set where. As a general rule of thumb, the more information you want to impart, or the more conversational you want the text to feel, will sit in the middle of a singer’s voice.

This is a lot to go into, and not exactly text setting, but it’s really important to the landscape of voices, and the work of singers.

Preparing For High Notes

Drama comes from extremes. A jump to a high note is going to suit dramatic text. And for voices with rich low notes, drama could come from unexpected low notes.

When you write a high note, it’s easier to sing if you don’t start a phrase with it, but jump up to it from a springboard note - a note in a phrase that precedes a big high money note. Not exactly a text setting thought, but a thought on writing for singers.

Singing Is Vocal Emotion

In the early 1990s I learnt singing from Pat, her little teaching studio taking up half her suburban living room in a nice but dull part of Canberra in the ACT. in our lessons I’d often hear her husband who I’m sure was called Norm in the house but he’d never come in. Pat was well into her 70s, and I remember one lesson she modelled for me an effortless high Bb, starting with the smallest pianissimo and then building with that thrilling combination of control and freedom of the great singers til her voice grew and grew to a rich and magnificent fortissimo. Then turning to me to say, “why don’t you sing the note like that?”

Pat would have been born in the early 1920s and had her formative singing training in the 1930s and 1940s. She told me her teacher had been old and that their teacher had been old. So Pat’s ideas and techniques were old school - coming from quite a different time. Some things have changed - I think vocal science has contributed a great deal to singing learning and teaching, and I’m grateful to have been alive to see its development. But I find myself still informed by Pat’s ideas and techniques.

Particularly that singing is emotional sound. We used to weep and wail and laugh and moan and groan. Examining as we did what various bits of my torso were doing, to then bring in a managed way to song. Now that I’m writing for singers, I hold this as a tenant. Singing is emotional sound. Of course there are moments for information, for exposition and explanation, but then we need feeling.

When I’m writing I continue to make the sounds Pat and I used to workshop. Not to notice my torso but to listen to the tunes of emotion, to what the melodies of feeling are.

Performing. What If Singers Were Actors

Singers stand in front of audiences and deliver text. That’s a lot like what an actor does.

I was working with the cast in a production of Shakespeare’s Pericles, on the score I’d written. In rehearsals, I shared the theatre lobby with the speech coach. The two us at either end of the space, working with cast members away from the main rehearsals. He on speech coaching, me as repetiteur for my score. Maybe this was less than ideal, in terms of not invading each other's aural work space, but it meant I got to observe his work with the actors.

What struck me was he was doing exactly the same work I was doing to set the words to music. And it is a bit of work - Shakespeare can take some unpacking. WHY is THIS character saying THESE words NOW? To WHOM, to WHAT PURPOSE? I learnt acting is text setting, just without musical notation.

Composers need to address the same questions - singers entrust this work to us . And not just for obviously dramatic music. Every song has a POV. Every song requires our singers to deliver text in character of some sort.

I was so inspired I started going to acting classes and am pleased to report my teacher says actors need to decide on pitch, pause, pace and volume of text to tell the story. In theatre rehearsals, directors, actors, speech coaches set the text, deciding on what needs to be elevated, accented, unaccented, rushed over, drawn out, given space for thinking and other non verbal activity. At what speed must the text be delivered? That’s text setting!

Don’t Be A Ham!

I think much like overacting, it's possible to overset text. To feel like text painting - the word high MUST be set high, the word SOFT must be sung quietly - may be true at surface value. But in great text, words say many things at once and over setting the most obvious meaning can cut off other meanings. In acting class, Tony keeps telling us to "stop acting".

Have you sung Joe Twist 's setting of Do Not Stand At My Grave? On the text

" I am the swift uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight"

the music broadens out in space and volume to a fortissimo. It's magical. And articulates the feeling, the imagery, and didn't get caught up on the surface meaning of "quiet".

One acting idea I love is - for emphasis to work, we must be prepared to throw some words away. Emphasis only makes sense contrasted with non emphasis. What does this mean for our compositions? I don't always know the answer, it's not easy to throw words away! Particularly when line matters.

But I think it has allowed me to think about how to de-emphasize words, like getting through them quickly, and feeling ok about giving them boring notes.

Acting And Timing

The way a character thinks is expressed rhythmically. Characters, like the rest of us, are aware of our thoughts more than our emotions. If a character "discovers a thought", they can need time to find it. If a character is filled with ideas, they might tumble out on top of each other. This aspect of rhythm is something outside the inherent prosodic rhythm of the words, or using rhythm to articulate and heighten the emotion of the words. It's about how the character thinks of and arrives at the words they are saying.

In the first example, a simple song in C major in 4/4. The piano, after 8 bars of very standard 4/4 introduction confidently arrives at beat one of the bar ready to go. Meanwhile the singer, instead of coming in assuredly on beat 1, takes a moment to pause and think, to discover the question. I wanted the character to have a chance (beat one) to put their thoughts together into words, so they could then put the question out there.

Second example, the character is much more certain, they already know both the questions they are asking and the answers. So they are posing these questions to someone else, in a more performative way - to pose and then answer their own questions. This is about presenting rather than discovering. They get to come in on beat 1, and then the second question comes quickly, I've halved the bar before they ask the second question. I wanted to express that they don't need thinking time. They are quick to answer the second question too, I could have made that 3/2 bar into two bars 2/4 and 4/4, based on the text alone, but I wanted to communicate to the singer that the answer comes smoothly to the character, they barely finish asking the question before they start answering it and I didn't want the break of a barline to interfere with this. It might suggest some sort of break, that would undermine the character's thought process.

Which Words Matter - Try The Verbs

This text setting thought comes from acting director Tony Knight. who says "play the verbs". I think we can be drawn to making nouns climactic, or even adjectives and adverbs cause they are so gorgeous. But just like poets are discouraged from making a mean of adjectives and adverbs, can we not make them the focus of what our singers say?

What happens if we focus on the verbs? What does that give our singers that they can use to engage their audiences?

How Do Characters Feel About Themselves?

How a character feels about themself will make a difference to how they sing about themselves. This comes up most literally in how we set words like 'I' or 'me'. When a character is rather self impressed figure 1 they will love these words. This is the Judge Most Imperious in my little brie opera, having an I AM (marvelous) moment. But then figure 2 setting psalm 22 for Forsaken, being nailed to a cross and left to die, I thought the singer would throw these ‘I’ words down into the dust.

Performing Outside The Text

Technically this idea isn’t about text-setting. It’s a thought about the opposite.

Silence. In music and in acting silence is very attention grabbing. There is space between words, phrases and verses/sections in the text. How are you setting the spaces? What will the role of the accompanist/s be? What do you want your singer to be doing then? What is their character doing? Standing there, with one hand on the piano, gazing meaningfully? Can you give them a more deliberate sense than that? Even if the singer is standing still staring into space, can you give them some ideas in the music of action they might be doing? A place where they might respond to what the accompaniment is saying with a little smile, a lifted eyebrow and share a moment with the audience.

Here’s a fun thought. Singers can lie. Instruments do not lie. I picked this tip up from a theatre director/composer colleague and it's just wonderful. Characters lie, to themselves, to each other, to the audience. And in this, their melodies will be caught up in the lie. A villain's veneer of elegant largess will require elegance in their phrases.

But the instruments must tell the audience the truth. Perhaps their truth is complicated. Perhaps they have been commissioned by the villain to help convey elegance, and are trying to do their job but it's a struggle, because they need to at least warn the audience (even if the hero can't hear it yet) of the villain's villainy. So the accompaniment could be quite at odds with the obvious text.

Melodic Cadences

Preceding most important words/notes will be a tension note, requiring and heralding the coming resolution. We know this in harmonic terms eh, the penultimate tension of the dominant. For singers who sing one note at once, this will be expressed in terms of melodic feeling, and text delivery feeling.

Consider THAT note in Nessun Dorma. You know originally it was a SEMIQUAVER! But the potential of THAT note, the tension in it once it's stretched out, has since become such a signature of this aria.

We need to write with awareness that singers with sensitivity to the tension created in these penultimate notes - in whole songs, inside verses, even inside phrases - will need space to lengthen them. How can we write for this?

I think it requires managing the accompaniment. Making sure that the tension notes have space in the accompaniment, so that the singer can lead the tempo. Music with vocal cadenzas is a good starting point for considering this. A whole bar with one chord for the instruments for the singer to do what they do, and the instrumentalists to patiently wait.

Of course accompanists and conductors will aim for sensitivity to singers' interpretations. However we can make this easier for everyone to navigate by writing for it. Give singers space on the tension notes, so they can lead the rhythm.

What If Singers Were People

Singers Are Their Instruments

I once sat in a recording studio while the sound engineer, the composer and I listened back to a recording of my singing. The composer said to the engineer as if I wasn't there, "her voice sounds so cold. Is there anything you can do to warm it up?" He wasn't saying the recording was cold, but my voice. I knew this because it was after a rehearsal process where he had been complaining about my tone the whole time and he was hoping it could somehow be fixed in post.

Thankfully the sound engineer told him the tone was fine and I was able to leave them to it after one take, shaking off the demoralizing frustration of the experience as I drove home.

Perhaps this is more about working with singers than working with text. Singers need to be treated with respect and kindness. Not because they are high maintenance divas. Singing is unique among instruments in that no part of the music making is external to the person. Singers are their instrument. When you speak to them about their voice you are speaking to them about who they are as a human.

Add to this that singing technique is about emotional expression and communication. This doesn't mean singers are caught up in their own emotional response to the music (that is the audience's job), it does mean they are giving their entire bodies and minds over to expressing and communicating emotional tone. There's no faking this and it is an act of great vulnerability. It requires literally laying oneself bare.

Which is not to say you can't ask them if they can change things - including tone colour. Of course you can. But it does mean if you want composing for singers to be mutually uplifting, joyful and creative it's worth being sensitive to the vulnerability required of singers. Voice and heart are essentially the same thing.

The composer in that studio may as well have said "her heart is cold."

Singers Uniquely Rely On Audiation

I try, not always successfully, but I try to compose music with the thought of the moment musicians stand backstage about to walk on to perform. Are they excited and confident, feeling they will be performing something they know they can present beautifully, and connect and move their audience, or are they fretting over whether they'll even get through bits of my work at all, much less be able to enjoy it.

In my own gigging days, I've felt both ways, and I know which I'd prefer to give to the people who bring my composing to life.

My voice as a composer is quite tonal and lyric, so I guess navigating this all is easier for me than more adventurous composers. I also want to acknowledge and respect how skilled and dedicated musicians who work with composers on new music are, and how thrilling realising new works with extended techniques and approaches can be for composers, musicians and audiences. I don't mean for one second to say I think composers should dumb their music down and patronise their musicians. It's not that.

Last night I came across this comment by a musician, on a post by a very bright young composer. This comment, from a musician's point of view resonated with my thinking. "I think as I get older I get less tolerant due to time pressures and also because I want to make a piece work not struggle through the maths of it. For me colour, music, meaning and notation are the most important. My question to composers is why complexity? For vanity or for the music. Is complexity in notation needed and does it hinder interpretation? I’m not accusing you of any of these by the way, but over the years I’ve come to a stage where I want to interpret and not simply survive a piece of music. For the pay we get for performing the time I have learning needs to have an output at the end where I feel rewarded if that makes sense."

This is most important when you are writing for singers. Singers can’t just follow notes on sheet music and push buttons. Singers have to hear the pitch inside their head to sing it. This is called AUDIATION. So if the music you’ve written isn’t catchy and hold some sensible tunefulness and musicality, you are asking singers to do a very difficult thing. Especially if they are performing from memory.

Can you sing every note you have written in a song? If you’re not a singer, I don’t mean technically beautifully, but can you pitch what you’ve written, and can you pitch it from memory?

Tenor Moments In Choral Music

In choral writing, don't forget to give tenors tunes.

(Of course it's nice for everyone to have melodic material and you'll make the altos' day by giving them something interesting to sing.) But, I want to focus on tenors tonight and the audience's experience.

Tenors voices can ring out when they get high, up into the leger lines. This isn't something we are taught in voice leading. When I learnt to write for choir I was taught the tenors (along with altos) were an "inner voice" and should fill out the harmony with the least drama possible and some pleasant but harmless passing notes and occasional suspensions.

But when tenors sing high, their tone will stop sounding mellow and stop functioning as aural filler. It will ring and draw the listeners' ear. Because the tone draws attention, write something worth attending to! Tenors appreciate it too. I've always noticed tenors have an instinct for these composed moments, and play them gorgeously.