Hi. My name is Matthew Prins. I want to let you know that this is me, because I am posting this only two days after my previous post, and so you may have thought that someone with lesser procrastination skills might have guessed my password (it's "PShoreRulz," by the way) and broken into this journal.
Not that I have anything to talk about, mind you.
Okay. How about this. I meant to do this in Catholic week, but why not now.
1) The first note of the first verse in "Wings" is one half step below the base of the chord: a C# against a Dmaj7 chord, I think. I like major 7th chords, but the major 7th is a difficult note to start singing a song on. Even in choirs, I hear lots of minor 7ths and base notes sung.
2) Not only does "Wings" contain my pet peeve of writing the rhythm around the lyrics (rather than the lyrics around the rhythm) and thus changing the rhythm from verse to verse, but...
3) ...even when the rhythm doesn't need to be changed, it is. In one verse, a dactylic foot is sung as an eighth note/quarter note/eighth note; in the same place on the next verse, the dactylic foot is sung as triplets. Which by the way...
4) ... is triply wrong, because triplets are difficult for amateur choirs to sing correctly (and near impossible for congregations), and is made even more difficult by the...
5) ...similarity of the eighth-quarter-eighth rhythm and the triplet rhythm. There's just a twenty-fourth of a beat difference between the spacing in the two rhythms. There's no reason all the verses couldn't have been a simple eighth-quarter-eighth.
6) The singer has to go down a fifth from the last note of the verse to the first note of the chorus. That isn't easy to hear and sing in the best of circumstances, but it's made more difficult by that pesky bottom note, which is a (I believe) an A below middle C for women, and an A below low C for men. And it gets worse.
7) In the next measure, there's a sixth down (to that low A) followed by a fifth up. And you think we're done?
8) In the measure after that, there is a minor seventh down (to that low A), followed one beat later by a sixth up. (For those of you scoring at home, that's a half-step difference.) I'm awfully good with relative pitches, and I can't always hit both those notes correctly.
9) It just sounds amateurish, like Joncas wrote it on his lunch break from his job at the widget factory.
10) There aren’t SATB parts. (I can’t imagine a SATB arrangement that’d sound good, but still.)
oh so lovingly written by
Matthew |
i sincerely do not know what you are doing here. are you lost? were you
looking for your delicate calico cat, and did you follow her up two flights of stairs
to this room? she is not here. she was here, yes. we gave her a warm bowl of milk, we talked with her about campaign finance reform for a time, and then she bid us good day. i believe she was
going to the post office two blocks down, but i don't quite recall.
for surely you did
not find your way from prinsiana, the least traveled site on
the internet. if you did, though, perhaps you are looking for humor. perhaps you are looking for profundity. perhaps you are looking for answers.
i'm sorry, but you shall go naught-for-three.
