The Perfect Scan (mini-episode)

What's more important than a perfect rhyme? A perfect scan. Every stress in the lyrics must fit with the stresses in the music. This is why (good) musical theater writers stress about stresses. Host writer/composer David Rackoff looks at what that means, how it works, and what it sounds like when it doesn't work. Examples (some good, some not-so-good) from "Into the Woods", "Defying Gravity", "Sunset Blvd.", and "Sweeney Todd". If you've never thought about this before, you will after listening to this episode!

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Nothing Like Broadway mini-episode.
I'm writer-composer David Rackoff of the upcoming Off-Broadway Musical, Nothing Like Broadway,
and this is the podcast where we look at songs from musical theater and then we pick them apart
to see how the music works and how the lyrics work and how they work together to help tell the story.
So today we are talking about scansion, specifically the perfect scan.
Now this is a topic that if you are not a musical theater writer, you might not even have thought
about too much, but it really is 60% of the ballgame when you are writing musical theater songs,
I think. Music has stressed and unstressed notes, and words and sentences and paragraphs
have stressed and unstressed syllables. And the goal when you're writing musical theater is to
have those things line up perfectly. And the bigger picture of this part of writing a song
is called prosody, and that is how the music and the lyrics work together, which involves more than
just the scan, but for today we are just talking about the scan, which is the stress patterns of
the music and the stress patterns of the lyric and getting them to work perfectly together,
both so that there's not just like the wrong syllable stressed, which is really crazy sounding.
Like this is a big pet peeve of mine, but it has become more and more acceptable in musical theater
writing that like it's okay to have a crazy stress on something, and it's not. Just like in a
sentence, if I were just saying like, what time do you want to go to the store? You'd be like,
what? What just happened, David? You just stressed the word the so hard. Are you having a stroke?
Are you an alien who doesn't know how to use the English language? Like what's going on?
And so that's something that is not acceptable to me in musical theater writing. There's a whole
Saturday Live skit. It's like Will Ferrell and Rachel Dratch, where they are the lovers. One of
their character quirks is that they're like, oh, come into the hot tub with me. And they're saying
hot tub, but it's just a weird quirk that they're saying hot tub. And it's funny because it's so
weird for a human being to stress those words in that way. And so that's something when you're
writing musical theater, you really want to avoid. So let me just give you a couple of examples of
really, really good scans. So I always think of Into the Woods, the opening number from that.
Into the Woods and Down the Dell, The Path is Straight, I Know It Well.
Like that's exactly how you would say it if it were regular dialogue. And that's how it is set in
the music in the score. In fact, in Forbidden Broadway, which is like a parody of Broadway
shows, there's actually a song called Into the Words that is talking about Stephen Sondheim
and how he's such a wordsmith. And it goes, Into the Words, the Metaphors, the Sin, the Nims,
the Perfect Scan. Into the Words, the Details and the Tricky Little Phrases. Into the Words,
the What, the Where, the When, the Why, the Plot began. Into the Words, the Work, the Craft,
the Garners, all the Praises. Right? So like, and that's also set perfectly. It just shows you
how important it is to people who think about these things. It's also important to the audience,
even if they are not aware of it. So first, let's look at what causes stresses in music.
And the one that everyone thinks about is the beat. So if it's a song that's in 4-4, it's going
1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And so the 1 is the downbeat. It's the most stressed.
The 3 is the second most stressed. And then the in-between things are less stressed. And so that's
the first big one. Like, if you can't put your main words on your main beats, you know, what are
you doing? Why are you even bothering to write musical theater? So like, just an example of that
is 1, 2, 3, 4, I declare a thumb more. Right? Like, that's set perfectly. You're actually counting
the beat. 1, 2, 3, 4, I declare a thumb more. Couldn't be more easy to understand, something we've
all heard. And then there are things that make it a little bit trickier that go beyond just the beat
in the music. So there's something called syncopation, which is where the note happens a little bit
before the beat, but continues on through the beat. And so when that happens, it actually sort of
absorbs the upcoming beat that it's attached to. So in You Gotta Get a Gimmick, a song that we did
a couple weeks ago on this show. But you gotta get a gimmick if you wanna get ahead. So if you
heard head, it happened before the beat, but because it continued after the beat, it actually gets the
major stress of the following downbeat because it's a part of that. And so in that song, you would want
get ahead because that's sort of the punchline of the line and it rhymes with the thing that came
before it. That's sort of a tricky one because not everybody knows that. You look at the page and
you're like, oh, that's starting on the last eighth note of the previous bar, which is not a
stress place. But because it continues on through the downbeat, it is still stressed. Another big
one people get into trouble with is melodic jumps. So even if something isn't that stressed in the
sheet music, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, if there's a big jump in a vocal song, it causes it to be more
stressed than it is. So like an example that Sondheim talks about a lot, a mistake that he made that
haunts him or haunted him throughout his life that he talks about a lot is in the song Somewhere,
where it's like, there's a place for us, makes him crazy that he has the word on that big leap.
And so even though that the word is not on a rhythmic stress in the music, the fact that it's
such a big leap, all of a sudden makes the song sound like it's about the word. And then another
reason that something could be stressed is just the length of the note. So if you're holding a note
for longer than the notes around it, it will give that word more stress than it would otherwise get.
So like just a non singing example of this is if I were to say, just in talking, hey, it's not a big
deal. I'm just concerned about what you're doing. Right, like the fact that I held the word concerned
there for so long puts a lot of emphasis on it. So just to recap, it's the rhythmic beat, syncopation,
melodic jumps, and the length of a note that caused something to have more emphasis on it,
a bigger stress, whether it's literal musical stress, or just emphasis. And then one other thing
actually is if there's a really dissonant note, it will draw more attention to it. So a song that I
wrote called What If There Were No More Villains, in that song, the word villains is always set
in sort of a dissonant in a notes that are not in the key of the song. So that really draws your
attention to it. So I'll play you a little bit of that. So those are the main reasons that something
would be stressed in the music, which then you need to make sure that they are stressed in the lyrics,
or the other way around, by the way, if you're writing the lyrics first, the composer needs to
be very sensitive to that. And it's something that, you know, they're working together. It's not
usually just that the musician is like, here's some music, here's some sheet music with no words in it,
put words in it. That sometimes is how it works. But it's more a matter of problem solving and
going in with the composer and the lyricist collaborating and figuring out, okay, wait,
this word or the sentence is not stressed as it would be in speech. Let's figure out how to make
that work. And then you have to repeat that pattern every verse or every chorus in the same place.
So it does involve making some choices. And it's not that easy to do, even if you were somebody
like me who was writing both the music and the lyrics, I have these like internal struggles in
my head of like, oh, the music really wants to do this, but the lyrics want to do this.
How do I make it work together? It's not just about the specific words. It's also about the whole
sentence and the whole paragraph. Like this all should sound like dialogue. And that's why it
matters is because once people started taking musical theater seriously as an art form, as they had
with, you know, plays for hundreds of years. So, you know, around the Oklahoma times, we just use
that as like an easy dividing line, all of a sudden, the lyrics have to have the dialect of the
character speaking with the level of intelligence that the character has in the same way that dialogue
in drama had been considered an important thing to craft appropriately for the dramatic moment
for hundreds or even thousands of years. All of a sudden now it was like, oh, okay, so now that we
are taking musical theater seriously as theater as drama, we now need to make sure that the lyrics
are spoken just like they would be with dialogue. And then another reason is it also just makes it
easier to understand. We're going to get you an example in a minute of a bad scan that makes the line
completely baffling as to what they're saying. And it's, you know, it's just it's human beings talking
if you don't want it to feel like a pop concert because for some reason pop music
is much more loosey-goosey about this stuff. But in theater, not only is it drama, it is drama that
is coming at you at a pace like whatever the tempo is, if you are watching a musical, you can't
rewind, you know, like you have to be able to absorb the information. And it's not your job as an
audience member to be like, they just said the word movies. What does that mean? Oh, movies. I
get what they're trying to say. By the time you've done that little mental editing in your brain to
understand what they just said, they're talking about something else. To have something play as
drama, you need to have the words sound like they are being spoken by human beings. And then this is
especially true with comedy. Like comedy is all about a clean setup and a clean punch line. And
so if you have sloppy lyrics where the stresses are not aligning with the music, you're just never
going to land those jokes in the way that you would if everything were set perfectly. All right,
so let's talk about a couple of examples of bad scans just so you can see what we were talking about.
So one actually is shocking from Stephen Sondheim into the woods. And it's always baffled me and
I've never been able to find out why it is. But it is in the same in the opening number.
Three of the characters say, more than the moon. And so the word the has that big leap on it.
And it makes the word the incredibly stressed in that sentence.
I don't get I don't know why that is. It's again, the example that I used to open this episode
was how good the opening number of Into the Woods is, except for that one glaring error.
More than the moon is just very, very strange. I don't have any idea why that is like that. But
that's an example of a bad scan. Sorry. I just saw Sunset Boulevard recently on Broadway. And
the big songs are okay for the most part. But it's all it's all song basically so that all the
dialogue or most of the dialogue is, you know, music and lyrics. And it is just like a mess.
We're just gonna look at one song. It's at Schwab's on Sunset. It's one of the in between
songs, not one of the big songs. And they keep saying movies, coffee. And it's like, like they
keep they say it over and over again. And it's just like, it makes me crazy when you're watching it.
And there's a line in that song where the person is saying, Hey, Joe, what are you slumming?
Is what he means to be saying, like, are you slumming? You know, like that sort of like
New Yorkie kind of like, Hey, Joe, what are you slumming? But it's set. Hey, Joe, what are you slumming?
And it's like, what does that mean? You know what I mean? Like you have to really sit there and think
about, Hey, Joe, what are you slumming? What are you slumming? Like what is that? Like the
punctuation is not part of that lyric at all with the way the music is. And it's just terrible.
There's tons of examples of that. I just remember watching it in the theater and just being like,
did no one like think to just go back into a second draft of some of these lyrics? Like this is a
mess. Although that actually brings me to a point that I want to make is it's not the lyricist's
fault. It's both of their fault. It's the composer and the lyricist. I've heard that Andrew
Woodweber is more like, here's the music lyricist go put some words on it. So I guess in that case,
if you're the lyricist, you know, you have no choice but to make it work, but then make it work.
And it's why like the Tony Award for the score goes to the score to both the composer and the
lyricist, not separately because you really can't separate them. So let's look at a couple of
examples of really good scanning in Defying Gravity, since that is on everyone's mind right now,
including mine. It's really nice the way that everything is set so that it has this sort of
like soaring magical feel to it. And then it ends with... And it's like cool because it's like,
that's exactly how you would say, and you can't pull me down. And you know, the notes are descending,
which is also appropriate. And then there's one thing in Defying Gravity that drives me crazy,
that is not written in the score, but it is a riff that some people do that kind of
shows a good example of why this stuff is so important. So it's the line, and if I'm flying
solo, at least I'm flying free. As written, it's great. And if I'm flying solo, at least I'm flying
free. Some people want to riff on the second syllable of the word solo. And so it's, and if
I'm flying solo, it's like sounds like you're saying so low. L-O-W, which is not, she's flying
high. She's Defying Gravity. If you're flying so low, so all of a sudden now, having the wrong
stress on that word because of the tonic prosody, which is where you make a high jump, there's a
stress on a syllable that should not have a stress, you're undercutting the meaning of the song.
And also having the music and the lyrics work perfectly together, it's more than just avoiding
mistakes. An example, when I was studying this stuff that they showed us is from the opening of
Oklahoma. It's the very first thing you hear in Oklahoma. The lyric, just I'm just going to say it
without any music, oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day. I've got a beautiful feeling,
everything's going my way, which is like really kind of trite and just like sort of not very
interesting or exciting or even beautiful, but it was not written as a piece of poetry that's just
perfectly to that music that all of a sudden it's now this glorious phrase. I'll play a little of that.
Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day. I've got a beautiful feeling, everything's
going my way. And the point of that is not that the lyrics are pedestrian and the music is really
good, it's that they work together really really well to all of a sudden make something that is
more than just the sum of its parts, which is you know 60% of what musical theater writing is about.
Try to pay attention next time you are listening to a musical theater song and just sort of see if
like oh yeah that's how I would say that if it were regular language and you know give the
writers a little pat on the back and if not give them a little tis tis tis.
All right so this has been the Nothing Like Broadway podcast about scansion.
If you like good scansion, if you like perfect scans come and see Nothing Like Broadway the
musical coming this fall off Broadway where I think everything is set perfectly, but if not
let me know and I will rewrite it. So please follow us at Nothing Like Broadway on Instagram,
you can look us up Nothing Like Broadway on Facebook. If you have a suggestion for a song
or for a topic of a mini episode email me NothingLikeBroadway at gmail.com and let's go out listening to
oh I mean obviously song time. Yeah how about Attend the Tale of Sweeney Todd a little bit of
that because that is just set so perfectly and it just really gets you in the mood. The music
and the lyrics could not be working together better to create something that is more than the sum of
their already amazing parts. Attend the Tale of Sweeney Todd
his skin was pale in his eye was odd
he shaved the faces of gentlemen who never thereafter were heard of again
he trod a path that few have trod did Sweeney Todd
the demon barber of Fleet Street