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Songwriter’s Scrapbook: ‘Winter Ocean’

This afternoon I thumped down a notebook and my dog-eared copy of Minot’s Three Genres: The Writing of Fiction/Literary Nonfiction, Poetry, and Drama on the kitchen table.

My intention was to read a few poems three times each: Once for fun; a second time, to mark up the poem’s structure and the techniques used; then a third time for fun again.

I balanced my guitar on my knee while I read.

As a songwriter I train myself to hear the rhythms of syllables, their subtle rise and fall, and translate them into music. I find it’s good to read poetry at the piano, or with a guitar on my knee.

I ended up composing music for a four-line poem by John Updike called “Winter Ocean.” It wasn’t what I sat down intending to do, but it did teach me a lot.

I’ll need to leave out the words to “Winter Ocean” because I don’t have any agreement with the late John Updike, his publishers, or his estate, but here’s the melody I composed:

I’ll keep the melody and write entirely new words (a reverse ‘ghost melody’) sometime in the future. Then this little scrap of song will be fully my own creation.

This melody’s in the D Dorian mode. The chords are Dmin, C, and Cadd9. I probably chose D Dorian because that’s the key I sang “Drunken Sailor” in back when I was singing sea chanteys in Maine pubs, so D Dorian makes me think of the ocean.

I began setting the words to music by giving stressed syllables higher notes – sometimes a higher chord tone, sometimes a nonchord tone. I started the melody with F3 for stressed syllables and D3 for unstressed syllables.

I mostly ignored the line breaks of the original poem, because the lines were irregular lengths. Instead I relied on my ear to create melodic phrases that sound natural.

When those notes got monotonous, I climbed to the fifth of the chord – A3 – for the second melodic phrase and then dropped my voice into a deeper register for C3 and A2 notes. In the finished song I may play up this connotation by singing these lower notes legato.

Updike’s “Winter Ocean” is only four lines long, but it contains four examples of something rare in the English language: three stressed syllables in a row. This was interesting to deal with musically because it’s an opportunity to try out different ways of emphasizing those syllables musically: Which of this three-syllable string should get the longest duration; which should get the highest pitch? Or should they all be the same?

The end of the melody is a little tense on purpose; the last note is D3, which is the tonic note. The tonic would normally sound very final. But I harmonized that note with a Cadd9 chord instead of the root chord Dmin, making the D3 sound like unfinished business…

— Nick at the Lyric Writer’s Workroom

Sunday March 17, 2019

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