Music dishes out joy, tears and, occasionally, the sensation of stepping on a stair that wasn’t there. Take the first two sung lines of this Everly Brothers song:Bye bye, love.
Bye bye, happiness
Both get the same guitar accompaniment but the first line is two syllables shorter than the second. To me, a musical ignoramus, the effect is strange. When I sing those lines an impulse deep within tries to force me me to complete the first line verbally – with a “di-dah” or by stretching out “lo-o-ove”.
I wanted to know: how the absence of those two syllables is represented on the score, and what effect the brothers were hoping for. A case for The Prague Polymath. Because I phrased my email so clumsily PP answered a different question, raising a much more interesting musical matter which I hope to return to. However, she also provided a link to the score.
For me musical notation could be Choctaw. But finally I traced the “missing” words to two symbols: a scribble and a backwards-way-round lower case r. Googling “music symbols” brought the answer: a quaver rest and a crotchet rest. Hurray for the ignoramus. As to my other question PP has a theory which I’m still studying.
But my point is one of simple revelation: the precision with which music is set down. Having made my infantile discovery I became aware – not for the first time – of how inexact words are compared with this other language. The technology of music. Briefly I played The Tin Ear’s Lament – oh, how I’d love to speak that language. Then I went away and mangled a poem.
