A picture paints a thou...

No it doesn't. 

<parenthesis>
The saying 'A picture is worth a thousand words' started to make an impression on Google Books – anachronistically, but you know what I mean – towards the end of the nineteenth century, but it really took off in the twentieth:

The value of a picture
(and the meaningless arriviste)

 

It's a useful rule of thumb for any writer:  showing is much more effective than telling. 

But this century, mercifully – for the most part – since I hung up my pen (professionally, that is; I still knock out the odd word), a meaningless variant has reared its ugly head. If I were writing for a living now I fear I would repeatedly be 'reminded' that 'a picture paints a thousand words'.
</parenthesis>

Composers of music have a tool that does the same sort of job: word painting. Choral singers are constantly remined of this. I have written many times about this. One of my favourite examples of this comes in Fauré's setting of Libera me: Libera me... in die illa tremenda ... quando coeli movendi sunt... et terra, dum veneris judicare saeculum ("spare me ...on that terrible day... when the heavens move... and the earth [too ...

<word-painting_note>
It's the music that underlines this addition: Quando coeli movendi sunt (reaching the tonic, after a repeat)...

<human-reaction>
A clap or two of thunder never hurt anyone.
</human-reaction>

]...et terra...(plunging down a seventh –  not quite an octave)

<human-reaction>
Oo-er. Feels more like an earthquake. Maybe I should be taking this more seriously
</human-reaction>

</word-painting_note>

]... It's the music that underlines this implied too.

<word-painting_note>

...dum veneris... (Now it's a full octave.)

<human-reaction>
!!!

<language-teaching-note>
English is unique in my (limited – the few languages I have studied in any detail are all Indo-European) experience in that it treats verbs in this sort of future as being in the present tense. But the future here is important; we make this sort of point in English by saying something like 'And it's a matter of when rather than if'. The octave drop makes it clear that this coming is inevitable.

<forthcoming-concert>
Coincidentally, I was impressed during a rehearsal for A night at the movies (see below) by Stephen Sondheim's exploiting of this in the words to America, which I have previously mistakenly 'corrected' in my memory to 'I think I'll go back to San Juan'. Sondheim needed to maintain the rhythm of da-da-da-'go back...'; so the singer says, in her Puerto Rican accent, 'When I will go back to San Juan...'. Brilliant.
</forthcoming-concert>

</language-teaching-note> 

</human-reaction>

</word-painting_note>

.... In an earlier post...

<deja-lu>

Longtime readers may get a feeling of having read this before. They have; but I wrote this before fully realizing how useful these pseudocode chunks are. So I've tried again.
</deja-lu>

...I concluded that an octave represented the distance from heaven to earth . But during our recent performance of Beethoven's Mass in C, with an orchestra, I noticed a bit of word painting that made me revise this view.  In the Credo, after the words descendit de coelis ("he came down from heaven") there are a few instrumental bars before the soloists take over from the choir. And just before the words et incarnatus est ("he was made flesh") a bassoon solo steps down two octaves:

The two octave plunge

So the number of octaves isn't relevant. The descent is represented by a number of octaves (or, if acoustics is your Thing, division of the frequency by 2 or 4 or...).

Returning to our forthcoming concert, a choral suite based on songs from West Side Story...

<forthcoming concert>
A night at the movies features vocal classics (some choral, like 'O Fortuna'...

 

 

<tangent>

from Carmina Carmina .../Let's Carl the whole thing Orff

(not my joke, but a good one)

</tangent>

 

...as used in many a horror film, some less formal like 'Siddown you're rockin' the boat': 

 

) 

</forthcoming concert>

... is the centrepiece. And West Side Story is my preferred source of singers' mnemonics...

<singers-device>

To make sight-reading less daunting, a singer often remembers intervals with  reference to particular songs. A perfect fifth, for example, is 'Ba-ba black sheep'. That's a common one. But each singer will have their own list. For me, a minor seventh is Andy Williams's 'I'm a home-loving man'. (Very fond of minor sevenths, Mr Williams; 'Now solitaire's the only game  for me', etc.)
</singers-device>

for the tritone 'bane of a child violinist's life', as I have said elsewhere:

<pre-script>
(bane of a child violinist's life, especially in the key of Bb if memory serves*, not that I stuck at it for more than a year or two; couldn't stand the noise) 

<footnote repositioning-rationale="for later post"> 

*  Close, but no cigar. I was thinking of the key of F major  (which involves a tritone stretch on the A string. (It all comes flooding back: An inch boy, an inch. Don't you know what an INCH looks like? My teacher, a dreadful old woman, was a fan of neither Galileo ... 

<clarification>  

(the father, that is, though doubtlesss the son "helped" with his father‘s experiments on string lengths and pitch) 

</clarification>

...nor Pythagoras.)

<eppur-si-muove date="2026">
Come to think of it though,  Bb would probably work as an example, as I seem to remember it involves a similar stretch. But F major was the one that came to mind – as it was my first exposure to the dreaded tritone.
</eppur-si-muove> 

</footnote>  

</pre-script>

But my thoughts about tritones in West Side Story will have to wait for an update. There's stuff to do in the garden.

b

PS

Don't miss the concert on 10 June.