Rendering the Sense More Conspicuous: Grammatical and Rhetorical Principles of Vocal Phrasing in Art and Popular/Jazz Music

Abstract

Singers two hundred years ago did not deliver the notated texts of recitatives, arias, and songs as literally as their modern counterparts do. Indeed, singers in the earlier era saw their role more as one of re-creation than of simple interpretation. Consequently, they altered the texts before them by varying the elements of expression known in their musical culture. Treatises from the period give detailed explanations of these elements, and a striking similarity exists between the method of phrasing that treatises describe and the practices exhibited on the recordings of modern jazz and popular singers. Holly Cole's recording of My foolish heart presents an aural image of a fascinating way of singing popular/jazz music that comfortably maps on to the verbal depictions and notated examples of grammatical and rhetorical pausing that survive from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pauses are essential in sung lines, and a highly articulated style of phrasing results from the application of stops within sentences: before prepositions, conjunctions, relative pronouns, and vocatives; after nominatives and prepositional phrases; between substantives and verbs and their objects; and in other places where the sense of a sentence would be made more conspicuous through the introduction of a pause.

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