Broadway MusicalLyrics

Chapter 11段馨君 Iris Hsin-chun Tuan

Associate ProfessorDepartment of Humanities and Social

SciencesNCTU

The lyric as literature

• Lyric put language to the task of expressing thoughts and emotions through the denotative and connotative meaning of words, patterns of literary development, and form.

• Words signify something.

• Lyricists employ such patterns of literary development as description, exposition, narration, and persuasion.

A Chorus Line

• Description involves the careful re-creation of the impression of experience on the senses- what it looked like, how it felt.

• successful description allows a community of strangers to see something together or feel something together.

A Chorus Line - One ( Finale)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyZeGOsR9IA

• Exposition beings the motion of the plot, pushes it for word, and records its denouement .

• Exposition defines the situation , reports an event , evaluates an experience.

• Lyricists find expository development most appropriate to presentational theater where characters confront the audience directly.

• When the writer selects events and orders them properly, the lyric moves the show that much nearer the desired resolution.

Vanilla Ice Cream- She Loves Mehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-WaGE9kklo&feature=related

• Lyricists are drawn to the appeals of argument and persuasion as well.

• Lyrics share stage time with dialogue, dance, scenery changes, and instrumental music.

• Most theater lyrics operate within a framework of 80 to 120 words.

Will He Like Me from the musical She Loves Mehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1rh0r6nwic&feature=related

Ruthie Henshall and John Gordon Sinclair in She Loves Me.

Types• The duty of the lyricist must

be to contribute the sound dramatic ideas that advance the theatrical interests of show.

• Romantic love in the theater dose not happen convincingly as an inevitable attraction of two disembodied spirits.

• The truth of the message lines buried deep within the literal message of the lines, giving each performer something to play apart from the game advanced by the meaning of their lines.

Paul Robeson - Ol' Man River (Showboat - 1936) J.Kern O. Hammerstein IIhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh9WayN7R-s

• To model a lyric on them means disaster, for they provoke audience response directly opposite to what is intended.

• A show that markets well-being as well as romance needs the charm song.

• The charm of musical comedy is that it pleases with a vision of a world where everything turns out well in the end.

Getting to Know You from The King and Ihttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aVbJhg23Ao

• Great art can be said to be moral in that it sustains life by contributing to the affirmation of what is right and good in the human experience.

• Since the popular musical theater requires comedy, the lyricist must come up with fresh, imaginative, and funny song ideas.

King and I

• A short-joke comedy lyric demands a series of payoff jokes in ascending order of effectiveness.

• A long-joke comedy lyric demands an extended setup that pays off in the single punchline that ends the song.

My Favorite Things - Julie Andrews - Sound of Music.flvhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eaGxLZrLuk

• The musical scene is more ambitious than the comedy song lyric.

• In the musical setting, solo voices give way to duet, then trio, then quartet, and climax in the passionate quintet for principals and chorus.

Dramatic function

• Musical theater lyrics give substance to moments of concentrated thought and emotion set up by the book and suggested by the music.

• Lyrics reflect character through diction, grammar, and rhetorical pattern.

• The language in the art of the song cannot be as spontaneous or haphazard as it is in life.

• A lyric propels plot when song language translates thought into action.

Anything Goes - 1988 Tony Awardshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVsD0rltRr8

• Measure the progress in the life of a musical show from before the lyric to after the lyric.

• Any show that pretends to develop a story or advance a concept cannot afford to absent its main idea from musical treatment.

• Songs of theme or concept must appear as the opening number in the score.

• Words can induce, sustain, or reverse a state of mind.

• Lyrics set the tone of a show, particularly when diction and phrasing embody a style.

Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum -House of Lycushttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NENSzTvsyL8

• Some scores prescribe songs that exist for their own sake.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Techniques of the lyricist

• The beginning of a lyric engages audience attention and announces the subject or title.

• A lyric development by the term lyric ascension.

• A section within the AABA lyric format.• The professional lyricist employs patterns of

metaphorical language as well as patterns of organization and development.

Mechanics

• The theater lyric is a compact of communication designed to carry a dramatic load a specific theatrical distance.

• since the songwriting craft involves blending language and music into song, lyric form must be compatible with music form.

South Pacific

• The AABA models adapt well to variations.• The standard AABA form adapts to ABAB and

ABAC and any other minor variation that responds to the needs of the musical book.

• Form controls the shape of the entire lyric; meter reflects the pattern of stress in the syllables within each line.

• Lyricists use rhymes within the lines known as inner or internal rhymes.

• Lyricists who rhyme use the technique in patterns known as the rhyme schemes.

• The principle language objective for the professional lyricist becomes this: find fresh, new ways to use the active working vocabulary.

Sources for lyric ideas

• The elements of the book generate most song lyric ideas.

• Book and lyrics explore the same dramatic territory, encounter similar obstacles, and benefit mutually from effective theatrical solutions to shared problems.

Criteria for an effective lyric

• The most effective lyrics are those which particularize in expressions appropriate to the book the universal thoughts and sentiments all men recognize.

• Since song lyrics lives as sound, lyricists observe elementary phonetic principles.

• Effective lyrics for the theater must give the performer something to act.

• Within that brief evolutionary cycle, “words by” metamorphosed into “lyrics by”, and that phenomenon dose a great deal to explain much of the accomplishment of the modern musical.