“Schubert found three ways… to set verses to music. (1) He wrote one verse of music and repeated it for each verse of poetry; this is called strophic treatment. (2) He followed the text as closely as he possibly could, setting each line with its own music, depending on the unity of mood, style, and the interest of the words to make the song a coherent whole; the German word for this is durchkomponiert, which meant “through-composed.” (3) He combined the two, most often by repeating his verse of music for two or more stanzas and then substituting entirely new music for the final lines to lend emphasis and surprise.”
“Schubert favored the freer, through-composed style, and sometimes made it so free as to begin a song in one key and end in another, because it seemed to him that was the best way to reveal the words’ inner meanings.”
“Schubert’s vocal line, like his piano accompaniments, was designed with utmost care and insight to reflect, amplify and spiritualize the expression of the words.”
-From Carter Harman’s A Popular History of Music
In the passage above, “verse” means “stanza.” I assume that poetry receiving strophic treatment had consistent syllable counts and rhyme schemes—I haven’t had the pleasure of hearing Schubert’s work yet.
Veeeeerrrrryyyyy Interesting…
this idea would be cool to rip off. How to do through composed music and still make it catchy?
Hmmmm.
My first thought is that the piece of poetry that’s being set would have to be remarkable to begin with.
And I suppose you could always experiment with strange sound textures and such…?
Schubert is very well worth closer study. I did a 10-page paper on him in undergrad for a music history class and learned quite a bit. (10 pages just on one song. I was going to compare and contrast three but there was too much material.) Like all the great ones, he makes it look so easy….
For through-composed songs, it can help with “catchiness” to have recurring melodic, motivic, or rhythmic ideas, at least in the accompaniment. Schubert does this in “Erlkönig,” for instance, with that little rising and falling figure.
And “through-composed” doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s no repetition, right Eric?
Just so. Freedom of form includes the freedom to be cohesive. Offhand I can’t think of too many through-composed songs that use a purely stream-of-consciousness approach (though Ned Rorem has done some excellent ones). Deciding which motifs can be repeated where for text-painting is a large part of the fun.