Translating stress into length? Quantity is I think more important than stress in setting words to music. Usually corresponds roughly to stress patterns, but not always, and there are variations in quantity that aren't accounted for in qualitative scansion. Any Elizabethan lyric provides examples. Robert Johnson's setting of Ben Jonson's Have You Seen but a White Lily Grow, or Dowlands's Fine Knacks for Ladies, for instance. Lots of nice performances on YouTube.
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>From: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Oct 17, 2014 5:57 AM
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>Subject: Re: For those interested in metrics
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>Thanks Jaime, these are great aren't they?
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>From what I understand Nathan's music already existed (there had been discussion with Scott about writing the lyrics before Byron took it up).
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>Not sure of how that worked in terms of setting the lyric. I imagine Nathan would have said to Byron, don't bother yourself about choice of meter, just write me a Hebrew-themed poem that matches the music in mood, and leave fitting the words to me. As I'm sure Kristin would have said there is little reason for musical and verse meters to match each other. Even though the song "If That High World" is duple on duple, the bars and feet do not coincide at all, the words are skewed across the bar-lines by varying note lengths, word repetitions, caesuras and line breaks (which occupy beats in musical meter but not in verse meter). I imagine it's comparatively rare, except in hymns, that a poem is fitted to a melody consisting of equal-length notes. In fact the most "natural" setting of iambic pentameter in music is probably triple time, allowing two musical beats for each stressed syllable and one for each unstressed syllable (as in "She Walks in Beauty") - the closest to speech-rhythm, I mean.... I'm sure others here know much more about this topic.
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