Prelude to Palin Song

Jonathan Marks, Poland

Jonathan Marks is the author of English Pronunciation in Use Elementary (CUP 2007). He is currently working on a pronunciation book for teachers. E-mail:jonathanmarks@wp.pl

It's common for English speakers to say that Italian is a 'musical' language, but I've also heard Italians say exactly the same thing about English. How is this possible? What does it mean to say that a language is 'musical'?

The raw ingredients of music are the parameters of timbre, volume, pitch, rhythm and (in some types of music, at least) harmony. These are also the raw ingredients of speech - apart from harmony, though even this can arise incidentally when speakers overlap. So what's the difference between music and speech? Firstly, different musical traditions have selected, systematised and hierarchised points along the parameters of pitch and rhythm, and incompetence in abiding by these conventions results in a singer being deemed to be 'out of tune' or to have 'missed a beat', and so on. Secondly, the conventions have been exported from the human voice to the innumerable other musical instruments that have been invented in various cultures and in various ages. Thirdly, the possibility of harmony has been discovered and developed. Speech, on the other hand, by exploiting the potential of the vocal organs to produce specific precise combinations of frequencies and timing, has enabled timbre to be codified for semantic purposes, so that it's possible, for example, for deem to mean something different from doom (though the meanings of these two words are still related) or for doom to mean something different from tomb. Speech also exploits timbre in a more general sense (to produce different voice qualities) as well as volume, pitch and rhythm, but these are not so strictly constrained and systematised as in music; if they were, speech would be indistinguishable from singing.

The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen believed that speech is a transitional stage towards the music of the future, which will be the language of more highly-developed beings than us. A more conventional - though nevertheless speculative - view is that speech is historically derived from singing, and that the earliest forms of language would have sounded something like birdsong. Jespersen, for example (1921: 419) suggests that melody in speech is in general less prominent than in the past: "In the works of old Indian, Greek and Latin grammarians we have express statements to the effect that pitch accents played a prominent part in those languages, and that the intervals used must have been comparatively greater than is usual in our modern languages."

But Jespersen notes that even in modern English, the melodic aspect may still be particularly salient in very emotional speech: "It is a well-known fact that the modulation of sentences is strongly influenced by the effect of intense emotions in causing stronger and more rapid raisings and sinkings of the tone."

So perhaps as we acquire a particular language, become aware of what langauge does, and learn to respond to the semantics and pragmatics of speech, we become increasingly deaf to its underlying constituent musical qualities. Even when we hear exceptional stretching of normal parameters in a language we're familiar with, we're more likely to say, for example "What are you so agitated about?" than "Why are you using such a wide pitch range?"

When we hear a language that we don't understand, on the other hand, we're more likely to notice its musical qualities, because the attention we could potentially give to understanding it is made available for noticing the purely sonic impact of what we hear. Generally, people tend to be aware of the sonic and musical qualities of other languages more than their own. I've heard speakers of numerous different languages say things like "Our intonation is flat" or "We don't use intonation".

The work of various composers has highlighted points of similarity between speech and music, and one outstanding example is Steve Reich (b. 1936). In some of his early work, Reich used recordings of speech as a basis for composition. In 'Come Out', for example, a tape loop of a five-word speech extract is played initially on two tape recorders which, because they are running at marginally different speeds, gradually move out of phase with each other. The two channels then split into four, then eight, and so on. The result is a gradual, progressive alienation effect: the 'text' becomes increasingly incoherent and the musical qualities of the speech sample - rhythm, melody and timbre - become increasingly salient.

Some twenty years later, in 'Different Trains', Reich took short speech samples with a more-or-less well-defined melody and rhythm, and used these 'motifs' as the raw material for a work in which the original speech 'performs' alongside the instruments - in this case a multi-tracked string quartet - which double, harmonise, repeat and develop the melodies and rhythms of the recorded speech. The meanings of the text extracts aren't neglected, though; 'Different Trains' has a strong narrative element, and this element is developed further in later works such as 'The Cave', an epic documentary-music-video-theatre piece which is similarly based entirely on samples of recordings of speech.

Someone else who is clearly aware of the musicality of the English language is Henry Heys, a 'NYC-based pianist/keyboard player, composer, producer and arranger'. If you go to 'Palin Song' at www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=9nlwwFZdXck you'll hear how his piano accompaniment follows, highlights and supports the melodic twists and turns and the kaleidoscopic rhythms of an extended stretch of speech.

Reference

Jespersen, 0. 1921/1964. Language - Its Nature, Development and Origin. New York, Norton.

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