Ukrainian stress

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Geoff Chew wrote:

> Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
> 
>> As I understand it, a "foot" is one stressed syllable plus whatever
>> unstressed syllables it takes to get to the adjacent stressed
>> syllable. In some poetry, the unstressed syllables occur before the
>> stress, in some they occur afterward. The definition is similar to
>> that of a "wavelength" -- the distance from crest to crest.
>> 
>> In most Western musical notation, the assumption is that the stress
>> begins a foot (ONE and | TWO and | THREE and...), but much of our
>> poetry is iambic (and ONE | and TWO | and THREE...), so songwriters
>> must go to some trouble to align their poetic stresses with the
>> musical ones.
> 
> Western musical _notation_ has no problems with upbeats and iambic
> feet -- it's very common for musical phrases to begin with one or
> more unstressed beats, and the convention is to have incomplete
> measures (in English usage, bars) to cope with them if they start a
> movement. 

Sure.

> There is never an assumption that the measure is the same as the
> "foot".

Certainly, and I would never make such a ludicrous assertion. The bulk 
of Western music has three or four feet (beats) per measure, but there 
are many other common options -- I certainly don't need to explain to a 
musicologist.

Things get more complicated as we get into the hierarchy of stresses 
(some syllables are more stressed than others, in both music and 
poetry), but I don't think we need to delve into that for our present 
purpose.

> In fact there are no difficulties of notation standing in the way of
> songwriters trying to match poetic and musical stresses, although
> conventional western notation may not easily cope with extremely
> subtle nuances of timing if composers want to go down the road of
> extreme realism.

Well, of course, it can be done, but a poet isn't automatically a 
songwriter, and a musician isn't automatically a poet. The people who 
have the skill and talent to write good poetry to good music (in either 
order or as a single integrated task) are few and far between.

As you know, a musician has tools unavailable to a poet (e.g., chord 
progressions, dissonance/consonance, etc.) that can influence the 
perceived rhythm and stress; similarly, a poet has tools such as rhyme 
and alliteration that are unavailable to the musician (though I will 
readily admit the possibility of equivalents).

What I meant to say was that you can't simply drop a line of verse under 
a line of music, align the beats, and have it work. There's much more to 
good songwriting than that -- again, nothing I need to explain to a 
musicologist.

> Western musical _rhythmic theory_ is a separate issue, but to be
> honest also hardly affects composers of songs or singers. Most
> rhythmic theory in English still uses the traditional vocabulary of
> iambs, trochees etc (old favourites are Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard
> Meyer, _The Rhythmic Structure of Music_, Chicago 1960; Maury Yeston,
> _The Stratification of Musical Rhythm_, Yale 1976), even though Hugo
> Riemann more than a century ago complained that it falsified the
> nature of musical rhythm. (What he proposed instead is like Paul's
> notion of waves, except that he wanted to measure from trough to
> trough rather than from crest to crest, making the basic unit one of
> growth and decay.)

I would have no objection to such a treatment.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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