Texture (Exercises 61–80)

The exercises contained in this chapter provide guidelines to explore different types of textures through analysis and experiments in stylistic imitation. Exercise 61 proposes the use of analysis and stylistic imitation; 62 is based on voices that move at the same rhythm. Numbers 63 and 64 are intended to work on melodic motifs and polyphony. Phasing is incorporated in 65; 66 talks about plaining à la Debussy. The goal of 67 is to dissect a complex texture to generate individual lines; 68 uses the concept of a rhythmic ostinato as a unifying factor. Numbers 69 and 70 incorporate aleatory concepts. Micropolyphony is the base of 71. A free approach to Fux and species counterpoint is the core of 72 and 73; 74 and 75 deal with timbral modulations and changes of orchestrational color; 76 is also about orchestration, but it specifically tackles orchestrational volume. Framework 77 uses text painting and the translation of the written word into sound. In 78 students will experiment with heterophonic textures and in 79 with layered (or stratified) textures. The final exercise 80 deals with sound masses.

Painting a Musical Masterpiece

Chapter 6 discusses “What Goes Around . . . Comes Around,” Justin Timberlake and Timbaland’s magnum opus, a seven-minute-plus track spinning a saga of love and karma through creative instrumentation, pointed lyrics, and an effect called text painting. Text painting sets a lyric to music that mirrors its meaning—such as a melody moving in a circle to illustrate the idea of “coming back around.” It’s as if Timberlake starts his paintbrush in the center of the canvas, on the home pitch of A, descends down as he repeats “goes around,” then makes a sudden upward brushstroke, before falling back to the starting note on the final “comes back around” right in the center of his canvas. Text painting dates back to the Middle Ages, making Timberlake a kind of latter-day troubadour and “What Goes Around” a modern ballad of courtly love.

Licentious Harmony and Counterpoint in Porter’s “Love for Sale”

No one would mistake Cole Porter's “Love for Sale” for a love song. Yet this less-than-subtle song about the world's oldest profession, from the 1930 musical The New Yorkers, confronts the nature of love and, by extension, the love song genre. Because of its daring text, it not only was banned in Boston but was considered so risqué that at the time radio stations across America refused to play it. Porter's musical setting of his infamous lyrics also deviated from the normative structures found in contemporaneous popular—and especially love—songs, and his structural departures were not simply motivated by relatively obvious concerns for text painting. This chapter attempts to unpack and understand these musical anomalies through close analyses of harmony, counterpoint, and text.

Text Painting, or Coincidence? Treatment of Height-Related Imagery in the Madrigals of Luca Marenzio

Text painting is a defining characteristic of the sixteenth-century madrigal style, especially in association with references to height. Whereas composers cannot have given musical illustration to every such reference contained within the text of a madrigal, the question of whether or not the music that accompanies a particular reference to height constitutes an actual example of text painting is sometimes unclear. To explore this problem empirically, the frequency with which musical excerpts from a corpus of 201 madrigals composed by the Italian composer Luca Marenzio satisfied three proposed definitions of height-related text painting was measured. The three definitions required a vocal part to contain either a large leap, stepwise motion, or an extreme of pitch. Positive correlations were observed between the appearance of music conforming to each of the respective definitions and the presence of height-related imagery in the text, yet only in passages that satisfied more than one definition. The research suggests that no single definition is a reliable indicator of height-related text painting, and that most legitimate examples rely on multiple compositional devices.

Suggestions for Future Corpus-Based Text Painting Analyses: A Response to Strykowski

This commentary provides multiple suggestions for future research on text painting that have been inspired by Strykowski's (2016) quantitative analysis of height-related musical imagery. For example, musical features such as meter, harmony, and position may be incorporated to expand the scope of the research. The commentary concludes by referencing two additional corpora that may further benefit the quantitative study of text painting, namely, repertories that contain a dearth of word-painting, and an upcoming digital repository of Tasso-based madrigals.

Real Bodies in (Un)real Spaces: Space, Movement, and the Installation Sensibility in Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross

Live-action bodies traverse digitally-constructed and digitized spaces in Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross (Młyn i krzyż, 2011). Majewski, a Polish artist who has worked across media, imagines his film as an animation of the world represented in Pieter Bruegel’s painting, The Procession to Calvary. His unprecedented blending of real and painted bodies, spaces, and worlds in The Mill and the Cross draws attention to the necessity of acknowledging space and movement in contemporary approaches to embodied spectatorial experience. This essay considers how the film imagines and treats its space(s) and the relations it establishes between the film-as-text, painting-as-text, and the museal space that traditionally contains painting-but also, with increasing frequency, cinema. It proposes a reframing of the terms of discussion in intermediality, shifting from painting/cinema to installation/cinema. Finally, it explores a long-neglected notion of art and its space (and the possibility of inhabiting that space) as they (re-)emerge in contemporary expanded cinema.