Text setting

Sing "Happy Birthday" with the weight on the wrong syllables, "hap-PY birth-DAY". It sounds wrong at once, even to someone who has never studied music. The ear expects the stressed syllable of a word to land on the strong beat of the measure, and when it does not, the word comes out bent.

The fit between words and music has a name. Med calls it musical prosody, and defines it as fitting the words to the music, or the music to the words, based on the word stress on one side and the metric accent on the other (Med 1996, ch. XLIX). In English the usual term is text setting.

The rule

There is one rule: the accents of the words should coincide with the metric accents (Med 1996, ch. XXII). The stressed syllable goes on a strong beat, or at least on a beat stronger than those of the unstressed syllables around it.

Med's definition cuts both ways, and both happen in practice. A composer setting a poem fits the music to the words: the text already exists and the melody shapes itself to it. A lyricist writing words for a finished tune does the opposite and fits the words to the music. Either way, the meeting of stressed syllables and strong beats is what decides whether the song sounds natural.

Where the stress falls

Where a word's stress falls decides how it enters the measure.

Words stressed on the last syllable, such as "to-day" or "a-gain", begin with unstressed syllables. Those have to come before the strong beat, and the word asks for an anacrusis. One note before the barline, the stress just after it:

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Set the other way round, with "to" on the strong beat and "day" on the weak one, the same word sounds like "TO-day":

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Words stressed on the second-to-last syllable, such as "mu-sic", begin on the strong beat and end on an unstressed syllable, on the weak beat. It is the strong-weak shape of a duple measure. When such a word has syllables before the stress, like "re-mem-ber", the first goes into the anacrusis.

Words stressed on the third-to-last syllable, such as "beau-ti-ful", have one strong syllable followed by two weak ones. They fit naturally into a triple measure, one syllable per beat:

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The feet of poetry

The link between the rhythm of words and the rhythm of music is very old. Blatter notes that one theory of how the earliest music, written down without rhythm, was sung is that it followed the rhythm of the verse, and that some of the oldest rhythmic figures come straight from poetic feet, the patterns of strong and weak syllables (Blatter 2007, part 1, art. 5):

Foot	Pattern	A word with that shape
iamb	weak, strong	a-way
trochee	strong, weak	gar-den
anapest	weak, weak, strong	in-ter-rupt
dactyl	strong, weak, weak	beau-ti-ful
spondee	strong, strong	two stresses in a row
tribrach	weak, weak, weak	three unstressed syllables in a row

In music the foot becomes rhythm. The iamb and the trochee, short-long and long-short:

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The anapest and the dactyl, two shorts and a long, a long and two shorts:

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A word's stress can come from duration, from position in the measure, or from both at once. In the examples the strong syllable is the longest and falls at the start of the measure or just after it.

Syllabic and melismatic

A syllable can have one note or several. When each syllable has its own note, the singing is syllabic; when one syllable stretches over several notes, it is melismatic, and the group of notes on one syllable is a melisma. In the score, the notes of a melisma are covered by a curved line (Lacerda 1966, ch. IX):

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The first and last notes have one syllable each; the four eighth notes in the middle sing the same syllable. The melisma is the natural home of long vowels and of words the text wants to highlight. That is why it often falls on the stressed syllable: stretching an unstressed one draws attention to the wrong part of the word.

In vocal writing there used to be a custom of not beaming notes that carry different syllables, so that each syllable could be seen under its note. Lacerda thinks it better to follow the general rule and beam them by beat, since that makes reading easier (Lacerda 1966, ch. IX).

The misplaced stress

A misplaced stress is an unstressed syllable where a stressed one should be: "TO-day", "BE-fore", "RE-mem-ber". It is heard at once because the word, sung that way, stops being recognisable, or turns into another word.

That does not mean every song obeys the rule on every syllable. Popular music in particular plays with prosody: it shifts accents on purpose, stretches an unstressed syllable to create swing, marries syncopation to speech. The difference between a slip and a device is intention, and the ear usually knows one from the other.

What comes next

Text setting is where melody meets language. From there, the musical phrase and the phrase of the text are organised together, and the form of the song follows the form of the verse.