(Ger. Vertonung).
The composition of vocal music to a given text. Music with one note per syllable is known as ‘syllabic setting’ and that with many notes per syllable as ‘melismatic setting’; text-setting in which new syllables are enunciated at regular intervals (regardless of the number of notes per syllable) is referred to as ‘isochronic’.
A distinction may be drawn between text-setting and Text underlay, the latter being concerned principally with the allocation in editing and performance of given syllables to given notes. This distinction is not absolute, however, since the two areas often interact. Knowledge of the text-setting priorities of a given composer may help resolve questions of text underlay in sources of that composer’s music (as with Zarlino’s explanation of the practice of Willaert); on the other hand, when text-setting priorities are not independently attested, a sympathetic understanding of underlay may be one of the only ways to find out about those priorities (as in much polyphony of the 14th and 15th centuries). The term ‘texting’ is sometimes used as a general expression for both text-setting and text underlay, but is more often associated with the latter.
The study of text-setting may conveniently be divided into two broad areas: the syntactic and the semantic. Syntactic questions involve musical and verbal structures, and include relations between the overall form of a setting to that of the text, between individual textual and musical phrases, and between verbal and musical accentuation patterns. Semantic questions involve the relation of the setting to the meaning of the text, and are thus of central significance in discussions of musical meaning (see Philosophy of music). An additional bone of contention, contested in both the syntactic and semantic realms, is the matter of literary or musical predominance: commentators and practioners at various times have argued on the one hand that vocal music should ‘serve’ the demands of the verbal text (especially when this has previously led a purely literary life of its own), or on the other that literary concerns must be of subsidiary importance to the demands of music.
Strictly speaking, the term ‘text-setting’ applies only to those cases where music is supplied for a pre-existing verbal text, as in Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s An die Freude. Closely analogous interpretative issues are raised, however, in scenarios where words and music are conceived simultaneously as part of the same creative act (as in the works of Wagner, and some works by Schoenberg and Stravinsky), where words and music originate from a collaboration between composer and poet (or ‘lyricist’, as in the songs of George and Ira Gershwin), where words are supplied for pre-existing music (as in all contrafacta, for example, Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei, set to music from his own String Quartet, or in Michael Flanders’s song ‘Ill Wind’, in which the text is set to music by Mozart), or where it is impossible to tell (as in early repertories). In this broader sense, indeed, text-setting is a central concern of virtually all vocal music (for exceptions, see Absolute music).
The earliest musical notation systems – both ancient and medieval – originated as extensions of linguistic punctuation schemes, and it is therefore no surprise that relations between music and language are of the utmost significance to the earliest written repertories. Words remained important in vocal polyphony from the 13th century to the 15th, and the matter of text-setting was taken up with renewed vigour in the 16th, when many theorists issued instructions for both the semantic and syntactic matching of music to words.
The Council of Trent (1563) established textual intelligibility as a priority for music in the Roman Catholic liturgy, and works by Palestrina were later endorsed by church authorities as meeting this criterion. Meanwhile, Italian madrigal composers were exploring ways of representing poetic moods and images in music, including the use of ‘madrigalisms’ such as word-painting; this tradition was the context in which in 1605 Monteverdi proclaimed his ‘seconda pratica’, according to which music was to be always ‘the servant of the words’. Further means of realizing this aspiration were developed throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries as part of the exploration and discussion of connections between rhetoric and music.
Mozart wrote in a much-quoted letter that ‘in an opera the poetry must be altogether the obedient daughter of the music’. For much of the time in Mozart’s operas, though, while the poetry may be subservient to the music, both the poetry and the music (together with the text-setting practices that bind them together) are themselves subservient to the drama. This relationship was most fully worked out in the 19th and 20th centuries in writings by and about Wagner (for a discussion and extensive bibliography of word–music relations in opera see Trowell, in GroveO). Though less hotly contested, text-setting remained a key element in the development of non-operatic vocal forms throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The 20th century in particular saw an expansion in techniques for combining words and music, including Schoenberg’s Sprechgesang (halfway between song and speech) and the musical use of spoken language (as in melodrama).
The significance of the relationship between music and language is by no means confined to the Western tradition, but has been observed in a great many musical cultures around the world.
See also Madrigal; Mass; Melodrama; Plainchant; Rhetoric and music; Satz; Song; and Word-painting.
GroveO (‘Libretto (ii)’; B. Trowell)
T. Georgiades: Sprache und Musik: das Werden der abendländischen Musik dargestellt an der Vertonung der Messe (Berlin, 1954, 2/1974; Eng. trans., 1982)
J.A. Winn: Unsuspected Eloquence: a History of the Relations between Poetry and Music (New Haven, CT, 1981)
S.P. Scher: ‘Literature and Music’, Interrelations of Literature, ed. J.-P. Barricelli and J. Gibaldi (New York, 1982), 225–50 [incl. bibliography]
L. Kramer: Music and Poetry: the Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley, 1984)
D. Harrán: Word–Tone Relations in Musical Thought: from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, MSD, xl (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1986)
J. Coroniti: Poetry as Text in 20th-Century Vocal Music: from Stravinsky to Reich (Lewiston, NY,1992)
J. Halle and F.Lerdahl: ‘A Generative Textsetting Model’,CM, lv (1993) 3–23
M.L. Switten: Music and Poetry in the Middle Ages: a Guide to Research on French and Occitan Song, 1100–1400 (New York, 1995)
J. King: ‘Text–Music Relations, 1300–1500: a Bibliography’, RMARC (forthcoming)
JONATHAN KING