The Potency of Painting Words with Music Even Through Centuries
Music is all about the artistry of weaving sound to form tapestry for the ears. With only the ears, and little of the eyes, to receive the picture or feelings a musical artist wants to convey, it is then how the artist arranges these sounds and the way they fall together – or even apart – that would be able to create the image within the listener’s mind’s eye. A technique is then borne to achieve this when handling music that accompanies text or lyrics, called word painting.
Word painting, which can also be called text painting or even tone painting, is the “use of musical gesture(s) with an actual or implied text to reflect, often pictorially, the literal or figurative meaning of a word or phrase” (Carter 2001). The music itself creates a more integrative and complete image of what the text is intending to convey, forming colorfully around the lyrics being sung. An example of this would be when a bird is described in the text, the music will use flutes to paint the grace and movement of a bird.
Joseph Haydn is known to have excelled in the execution of the technique, showcasing his ability in it in one of his famous works, his oratorio The Creation. It also could have been an influence of Handel as the oratorio was made after Haydn felt inspired from Handel’s Messiah, which also displayed brilliant word painting in its own right (Classical-music 2016). As The Creation is an oratorio about God’s creation of the world as depicted in the Book of Genesis, the piece contains Bible verses that narrates the events unfolding, and along with added lyrics that further describes the narrated event in fascinating details, the music accompanying it rises to give the piece more impact and form, completing the picture depicting the event. Like so, the 7th movement in the oratorio, with the prelude considered to be the first, is ushered in with a strong deep bass of D minor to illustrate the narrative of “Rolling of foaming billows uplifted roars the boisterous sea” used to describe the movement of the waters in the creation of the seas and later in the same movement, the mountains. As the Bible and, consequently, the oratorio is depicting the strength of God through His creation of the world, the oratorio aims to deliver a strong impact of events in God’s creation upon the audience; therefore, using the music to give the dramatic and intense, and, in the softer events, romantic flair to express the event in vivid auditory detail.
In contrast, a Filipino composer and musician composed her own piece based on the story of God’s creation, though not an oratorio like Haydn’s or even Handel’s, but a shorter and smaller, yet no less impactful music piece – a cantata. Even though Lucrecia Roces Kasilag used 18th century forms of music, those from the time of classical artists like Haydn and Mozart, for many of her compositions, she was able to incorporate her own modern Filipino spin to it to make it current and her own.
Her cantata “In the Beginning,” though also about the Creation depicted in the Book of Genesis, used no verse from the Bible. The cantata’s libretto instead described the events of the creation in its own way, making use of creative liberty, and spun a more dramatic and poignant retelling of the story of God’s creation. Both Haydn’s The Creation and Kasilag’s “In the Beginning” made use of a more dramatic text to spruce up the narrative of the events from the Bible, yet it should be noted that while The Creation further expounded on the event itself, “In the Beginning” put more emphasis on the strength and capabilities of the Lord within the text. In The Creation, the descriptive texts focused on furthering the image of the creation of the Lord, such as: “Through the open plains outstretching wide in serpent error rivers flow” and “Softly purling, glides on through silent vales the limpid brook.” On the other hand, “In the Beginning” gave more focus on the power of God, with texts mostly starting with the term “He,” such as “He sends the mighty winds” and “He sends the swirling winds into the heavens above,” among many others. Additionally, the text of “In the Beginning” also gave a more dramatic description of the acts of the Lord, using striking adjectives like “mighty” or “swirling” in describing things.
Even with just focusing on the lyrics of the musical pieces themselves, one can easily see the dramatic flair “In the Beginning” highlights. Furthermore, in word painting, the tone of the music usually follows the feelings portrayed by the text and expounds on it with a more vivid auditory image. As Godt says, “any meaningful attempt to appreciate a piece of vocal music must begin with its text” (Godt 1984). As the text was in itself dramatic already, the music accompanying it would undoubtedly be as dramatic or even more to be able to encompass the feelings the text wanted to portray within its words and impact the listener more effectively. This use of music to strike upon the listener’s feelings is especially true even to this day, with many cinematic and even promotional works taking advantage of the capability of music to greatly influence people. With the use of this potency of music in conjunction with the more riveting use of words to keep modern listeners engaged, Kasilag, even with using an old style of music structure, had created a compelling contemporary composition of her own.
Bibliography
Carter, Tim. “Word Painting (Ger. Wortmalerei)”. Oxford Music Groove Music Online, 20 January 2001. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/ 9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000030568#omo-9781561592630-e- 0000030568-bibliography-1.
Godt, Irving. "An Essay on Word Painting." College Music Symposium 24, no. 2 (1984): 118-29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40373748.
Guest blogger. “The Story of Haydn’s Creation”. Classical-music.com, 29 April 2016. http://www.classical-music.com/article/story-haydns-creation.
Holoman, D. Kern. “Haydn: ‘The Creation’”. UC Davis, 2017. http://arts.ucdavis.edu/post/haydn-creation.
Wikipedia contributors, "Word painting," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Word_painting&oldid=859956379 (accessed December 6, 2018).