Understanding poetic meter is a great help for music-making.
Last evening I took a few minutes to talk about poetic feet – iambs, trochees, spondees, dactyls – and how they work in poetic meter. As the stressed/unstressed paradigm came into focus, my students’ phrasing improved as they recognized that the wordless section in Billy Joel’s “Lullabye” was made of iambic feet.*
The flattening of the syllabic line is one of my pet peeves in reading aloud, and it’s as pervasive in sung music. (Instrumental, too.) Taking the time to recognize when we have iambs and when we have dactyls or anapests could be just the thing to help musicians breathe life into their phrasing.
I highly recommend Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook as a resource for all aspects of poetic language.
* In reflecting more on this, I realized that “Lullabye” is actually written in iambic pentameter – the same meter that Shakespeare used in his sonnets. Compare:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day (Sonnet 18)
Goodnight my angel now it’s time to sleep. (“Lullabye”)