Om kongruens mellan text och musik i sång

Abstract

On congruence between text and music in songs
The present article consists of two major parts: (1) a critical discussion of a previous proposal for applying certain linguistic concepts and procedures to the analysis of musical compositions and (2) a counter-proposal, including the presentation of a new method of
calculating so-called tonal and rhythmical congruence between text and music in songs. The earlier attempt in question was made by Björn Lindblom and Johan Sundberg (L & S); their report, entitled Towards a generative theory of melody, appeared in the 1970
volume of this periodical. L & S have adopted the ideas concerning stress and stress assignment expressed by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle - the leading exponents of the theory of generative transformational grammar (TG) - in their famous book The sound
pattern of English. In particular, L & S advocate an application of the two rules of TG called the Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR) and the Compound Stress Rule. The present author tries to demonstrate, by means of a concrete example (see Fig. 1), a few deficiencies of
these rules, particularly the unrealistic number of stress degrees resulting from the cyclical application of the NSR. The general validity of the TG dogma that ”syntactic structure determines stress” is denied. Instead, stress is here presented as basically determined by semantic conditions. Its essential physical correlates (in Swedish) are assumed to be intonation (fundamental-frequency variation) and syllable length. The occurrence of these two variables within the (spoken) text of a particular sample song (also used by L & S) is determined and typified according to the principles of recent phonetic theory and traditional metrics, respectively. The individual tonal and rhythmical occurrences are compared, syllable by syllable, with the corresponding items of the musical notation, i.e. with the relative pitch and time values of the separate notes of the melody line (Figs. 6 and 8). Finally, the number and percentages of positively correlated textual and musical values are computed. Naturally, this method of calculating tonal and rhythmical congruence is still at a rather primitive stage of development and will certainly need some revision.