Structural Interaction of Poetry and Music Components in Songs by Sergei Rachmaninoff

• Published in: Language, Music, and Computing pp. 127 - 139
• Main Author: Martynenko, Gregory
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 2015
• Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science
• Subjects: Cyclical fluctuations; Music; Pitch/duration index; Poetry; Rachmaninoff; Russian romance; Songs; Statistical analysis; Stress index; Time series; Trend
• ISBN: 9783319274973; 331927497X
• ISSN: 1865-0929; 1865-0937
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-27498-0_11

The songs by Rachmaninoff represent the superlative manifestation of Russian vocal lyrics, making these songs a perfect material to research interrelations between music and poetry. Structural interaction between poetry and musical components in Rachmaninoff’s songs is studied by time series analysis. Time dynamics of two indices are compared. Stress index is used for describing poetry component of the song and pitch/duration index is used for describing its musical part. The methodology of comparative study is demonstrated on three songs: All was Taken from Me,The Fountain and What Happiness. Time dynamics of the pitch/duration index has turned out to be a complex phenomenon. It combines a general trend with cyclical fluctuations, for description of which the notion of a poetry-musical period (strophe) was introduced. As a rule, a whole period corresponds to four lines. The intonational contrasts are more explicitly expressed in musical components of the songs than in poetry ones.