Skip to main content

It's Been Less than 0 Days Since Our Last Hamilton Reference JAMIE! // Abbie Hedden

 Am I gonna write on Hamilton and other Broadway shows? Absolutely. Did Jamie also write on Hamilton? Absolutely. Am I ashamed in any way? No, absolutely NOT.

WORD PAINTING IS MY FAVORITE LYRICAL TROPE. Is that what it's called? A trope? Probably not. You get what I'm saying. English Madrigals were deliberately lighthearted and avoided emotionally intense topics, but retained musical puns such as sopranos singing the words "all alone" up high on the scale... all alone. Unlike English Madrigals, Broadway has no problem getting serious... but its music loves puns. The three songs that come to my head straight away are Watch What Happens (Newsies), One Day More (Les Miserables), and The World Was Wide Enough (you guessed it...Hamilton). In Watch What Happens, the character singing it is writing a news article, while the jaunty tune and tempo sound like a typewriter in the backgroud. In One Day More, a whole slew of characters are joining together on sides of a revolution, and they're all singing at once. It really sounds like a crowd gathering around a fight! On another level, their tunes all come together and sing the last four lines in harmony. This shows musically that they are trying to reach a common goal. Finally, perhaps my favorite example of word painting is that in Hamilton's The World Was Wide Enough. Aaron Burr and Hamilton are in a duel and sing the lines together, "But we were near the same spot my (your) son died, is that why?" Burr begins the line at the bottom of the octave, while Hamilton starts at the top. Their voices "step" through the octave, making the notes have a duel. What are some of your favorite word paintings?


PS Clabo and Lily

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Word Painting in Vesta—Lily Caswell

  Word painting in Weelkes’s As Vesta Was from Latmos Hill Descending is quite interesting. And because that is a really long title, I’m calling it Vesta from now on. Word painting is basically when the melody matches up with the lyrics. So in Vesta, when it says “ascending” and “descending”, there are obviously scales going up and down. The madrigal was written for six voices to sing unaccompanied, so when they start to come together, it matches with the lyrics; so if the lyric says “two by two”, there are only two voices; “three by three” there is another voice added, and so forth. All the parts combine in exclamation before Vesta before it is left “all alone” to the highest soprano. All the way to the end of the piece, word painting continues when shouts of “Long live fair Oriana” with the bass sustaining long notes. Word painting in and of itself is a highly interesting topic because a musician takes the words of a poem or a sonnet and writes a melody line that pertains to cer...
4 comments
Read more

Honor and Gain; Which Do You Seek?

 Pericles.... thanks? I can only imagine that's what the family and friends were thinking after they heard his historic funeral speech honoring the departed. What do I mean? Well, Pericles briefly mentions the men who have fallen at the beginning of his speech, but then goes on to discuss how great Athens is, and how the contributions the city has made to the world are unmatched.. why? I understand that he is also commending the citizens of Athens and empowering them to continue to make their city greater, but I thought this was supposed to be a funeral speech about dead war heroes, not about Athens. Another thing I found interesting is what Pericles said on page five about honor: "For it is only the love of honour that never grows old; and honour it is, not gain, as some would have it, that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness" (Thucydides, page 5). Have you ever watched a show or movie, or read a book, about a duel between two men? There is always an unspoken agre...
Post a Comment
Read more

Aristotle Might Not Like Me...Or Jesus//Haylee Lynd

      Aristotle says that the man who does not get angry at the things he should be angry at "is thought unlikely to defend himself; and to endure being insulted and put up with insult to one's friends is slavish" (Aristotle 41). While he states that passivity is preferred to excessive anger, he still gives great criticism to it.  In contrast to Aristotle, the man who Christians believe to be the most just is Jesus who states in Matthew 5:39-40, "...do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well." Essentially, arguing that one is not to respond in anger when insulted or hurt, to not defend one's self. Most individual's are unable to achieve this. Our natural instinct is to defend ourselves, especially in physical cases. However, Christians strive to be like Jesus in this way. I would also argue that it is a very admirable wa...
2 comments
Read more