How to Write a Hit

Last night on NPR’s All Things Considered there was a story called How to Write a Hit.  The story describes the process of composing a pop song for young artists, in this case a new boy band called Mindless Behavior, composed of 12 and 13 year olds.  While the deliberate marketing to younger and younger children disclosed in the story is disturbing ("Let's not forget, thirteen-year-olds want to be eighteen," Riddick [a music producer] observed. "Nine-year-olds want to be thirteen."), what I found more interesting was the process by which these songs are produced.

An R&B producer walks into the studio and informs the song writers that he needs a new song for Mindless Behavior.  He immediately lays down a rhythm track and chord progression.  One of the writers begins humming a melody line that fits the chord progressions.  “Next comes figuring out this song's concept and title.”  Lyrics are added, and the song is finished in less than three hours.

What struck me about the process is how it is inverted from the way in which we think about sacred music.  In Gregorian Chant the text is primary.  The song is rooted in the lyrics.  In fact, in old manuscripts the word takes center stage even visually.  Many people are used to seeing the “modern” nuemes, but in the ancient notation the neumes were quite a bit smaller and written above the Latin text.  For instance, the following is the St. Gall manuscript for the Introit of Christmas Day, Puer natus est.

A closer examination is perhaps more helpful.

That’s right, those “scratches” that appear above the text are actually notes.  The text is absolutely primary; the melody is at the service of the text, in very much a grace-perfects-nature relationship.

In the case of the industrially produced R&B song (that took less than three hours), the process is backwards.  We begin, not even with the notes, but rather with the rhythm.  (In chant, the rhythm comes directly from the text/note combination.  “Rhythm” is an appropriate term for Chant even though it has no strict meter.)  Once the rhythm is laid down, the chords are added, then the notes, and only after the background is complete do the writers “figure out a concept and title”.  The very last step is to actually write lyrics.

It strikes me that this is exactly the problem with many of the modern liturgical hymns.  The melody is primary; the text is secondary.  This is why parts of the Mass Ordinary can be awkward in modern compositions, because in the Ordinary the text is given to us and not free to be manipulated to fit to the separately-composed melody.

In the Fall 2009 issue of Sacred Music Patrick Cunningham observed a similar phenomenon.  (I reviewed the article and went into more detail here.)

“On the OCP [Oregon Catholic Press] ‘Spirit and Song’ website, RR [Rock and Roll] composers frequently write about the composition process. They also give YouTube interviews on the subject, so we can generalize about how Catholic RR comes into existence. There are two starting points customarily used: 1) the composer ‘gets’ a chord progression, with or without a melody, and then finds a text to set; 2) the composer sees a short text from the liturgy or scripture, creates a rhythmic pattern and chord progression that matches it, and then finishes off the song with melody and additional words. The additional words are usually the composer’s own, since the scriptural or liturgical text, if any, does not fit the composed music. In general, then, the music is only lightly controlled by the text, and when there is such control, it is done by rhythmic sympathy, not any kind of tone painting.”

Gregorian Chant presents quite the opposite:

“Where much RR relies on trite musical phrases, the chant utilizes what we might call melismatic commonplaces. Perhaps the most familiar twin uses of a melodic line is in the introit for Epiphany, Ecce advenit, and the introit for feasts of the Blessed Virgin, Salve sancta Parens. The melodies are 98 percent identical, but so are the accents and word lengths of the underlying text. In fact, it is not possible when looking at the correspondence between the two to determine which setting was original. The fit is perfect in both cases. This is true throughout the Gregorian repertoire: even when melismas are used in more than one chant, there is an excellent match between text and melody—and the text is always in control.”

In his latest document, Verbum Domini, Pope Benedict called for a primacy of the Word in our theology, and in particular our Christology.  It seems that a parallel situation can be found in liturgical music.  It should be that the “text is always in control”, and the melody is at the service of the text.  Only then can the famous dictum that a prayer that is sung is twice prayed come to fruition.