Introduction
Music is indeed a very powerful tool when it comes to the complementing the words and action of visual art set pieces. Throughout history, various artists like have constantly been experimenting with music to see how they can they can use it to bring best out of pieces of art that contain actions and sounds.
George Frideric Handel, one of the most renowned music composers of all time, was an expert on this. In his oratorio, Handel achieved a lot through the use of music to support the words and actions.
Part one of ‘The Messiah’ mainly deals with the Jesus Christ’s birth prophecies by the prophet Isaiah. He is where we have ‘There were shepherds abiding in the fields’. Here, a soloist soprano music voice is used to complement the words being spoken. There is also the use of tone accentuation and an accompanying base aria. A close connection between the soloist voice and a trumpet linkage emerges. The two vices complement each other.
This is also incorporated in the chorus ‘Hallelujah’. The first part of the chorus is in a homophonic music texture. As the chorus proceeds, it gradually changes to polyphonic. The last piece of the chorus is particularly in an air’s musical form. Here, there is the use of smooth and flowing bows. The music directions of Handel in this part of the oratorio are actually larghetto e piano (which means the music is paled softly when the performer is talking and also there is the use of a large, stately and broad style and tempo). This complementary harmonization of the music and the words is however altered in the second part of the Hallelujah chorus where the bass is played in a vigorous and joyful manner to essentially capture the joyful and rejoining nature of the performer’s actions and words.
Harmonic interplay is also achieved greatly in "Erlkonig”, an art song by Franz Schubert. There a lot of piano triplets that is rapidly repeated in the course of the song’s performance. This adds more vigor and intensity to the words and actions in this famous art song. A sinister and dark melody further accompanies this, for example the father’s voice are given a pitch of lower register and the phrases are made smooth and legato.
The operatic commedia ‘Falstaff’ by Giuseppe Verdi is another example of a set piece that manages to use music as a complementary vice to the words and actions. It uses brief melodic bursts and melodic poems to convey the essence of a character with exemplary and stunning concisisions.
The 20th century cantata "A Survivor from Warsaw" by Schoenberg’s uses a bass continuo to accompany the words and actions in the set piece. There is the use of a lot of tripartite and trichord divisions to symbolically represent the word or the text of the art piece, for example to represent the presence of God
In conclusion, the composers of the pieces described above were able to use different elements of music like rhythms, melodic lines, tonalities, singing techniques, harmonies, instruments and textures to heighten or add more value and weight to the text of their compositions.
Works Cited
Thomson, V. (2000) Music with words: A composer's view. New Haven: Yale University Press.
