Ukrainian stress

[Chew G]

Now, that's another question. It probably is the case that Musorgskii's brand of realism normally demands that sort of approach (and this is one of the reasons why M and Janacek are sometimes bracketed together, though J too is a little more problematic in this respect than people sometimes think), but as a _general_ principle I wouldn't go along with Prof Newton's insistence on stresses matching up. There are often moments in great songs when that ought to happen; there may be some moments when the music should overwhelm the text regardless of the stress. I don't think scansion in verse is an adequate comparison. (Not to mention the 20th-century styles in which composers may, I think quite legitimately, regard texts as collections of interesting syllables rather than collections of impassioned sentences.)
 
Geoff
 
 Geoffrey Chew
 Institute of Musicology, Masaryk University, Brno
 chewg at seznam.cz
 
 Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London
 g.chew at rhul.ac.uk

________________________________

From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list on behalf of Dan Newton
Sent: Fri 2.5.08 19:05
To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Ukrainian stress



What's particularly interesting in this case is that it's such an 
about-face from Musorgskii's own approach in his other unfinished 
Gogol opera, Zhenit'ba, in which the musical line is subordinated to 
text to an almost unperformable degree.  Richard Taruskin has pointed 
to the particular stress issue I'm questioning as evidence of 
Mussorgskii's eschewal of kuchkist values.  The influence of folksong 
practice that Ralph Cleminson and Olga Meerson mention is undoubtedly 
on the money, and I'm grateful for it.  In _general_, however, I 
would like to point out that failure to match up a stressed syllable 
in the text with an accent in the melodic line is the hallmark of bad 
songwriting, the equivalent of a poetic line that doesn't scan -- 
which is why this particular phrase is such a curiosity, from a 
composer of such famous songwriting genius.
Dan


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