Aspects of pitch in textsetting: a suprasegmental analysis of two Turkish versions of Franz Schubert's Ellens Gesang III (D. 839)

Abstract

Focusing on the interaction of linguistic stress with the poetic and musical meters, and the melodic contour, this paper provides a qualitative suprasegmental analysis of two Turkish versions (T1: Ah! G & uuml;zel yavrum; T2: Duy ey sevgili sesimi!) of Franz Schubert's Ellens Gesang III (D. 839). The acceptability of Turkish lyrics despite the failure of T1/T2 to align stressed syllables with strong positions in the iambic feet points towards the relative insignificance of poetic meter. Based on an analysis of the 36 downbeats, alignment rates (the second German version [95.8 %] > the original German version [91.7 %] > T2 [66.7 %] > T1 [50 %]) suggest that factors such as word length and default final stress may have proven counter-productive for Turkish in stress-meter alignment. As long as musical phrasing is in conformity with linguistic phrasing, a melodic contour that mirrors phrasal/sentential intonation may reinforce intended meaning despite mismatched syllables. Singable lyrics need not exhibit absolute stress-peak alignment such that various degrees of mismatches may be tolerable, depending on factors such as melismatic versus syllabic notation, the relative duration of adjacent syllables, and whether or not the mismatch occurs at tactus level.