Natasha came and sat on my head this morning as I was trying to get up - because of the delay that the cat engendered (how can get out of bed if the cat is sitting on your head?), I got to listen to the radio-alarm longer than normal, nearly half-an-hour, actually. They, RTL, were doing a feature on a French singer, Bernard Lavilliers, and played a song called “On the Road Again” - entirely in French except the chorus. It’s very eighties, somewhere between Don Henley and Richard Marx, with lots of synthetic everything, though quite pretty nonetheless. It’s in a nice minor and nicely proportioned. The second chorus has a nifty Gainsbourg-ian (Gainsbourien) flourish, with women’s chorus backing up the melody in twisted harmonies.

(I’d like to embed the video from youtube, but I’m having some technical problems. For now, just head here)

But in my current dual roles as setter-of-French-text and teacher-of-English, what stood out to me was his setting of the English text. Spoken French lacks the inherent accents that we have in English. This is one of the reasons English is a so much more efficient language - the English “that thing” becomes, in spoken French, “ce truc-là” - the added word, là, providing the emphasis that in English would be provided by verbally accenting “that.”

What’s problematic with the song is that it is set as though it were French - without clear accentuation. The Willie Nelson setting of this line follows the contour of the spoken phrase (ON the ROAD a-GAIN, on and ‘gain getting secondary accents, and road receiving both a dynamic and an agogic accent) perfectly. The line forms a lovely little arc, which you also get, slightly altered, in Canned Heat’s version - the “a” in again is a little more present this time.But the word that comes out the most clearly in the Lavilliers isn’t “road” but “the” - a word we never emphasize in English except in exceptional situations in which we are pointing out the singularity of an object. This may be because of how hard it is for the French to say “the,” so the strain pushes it out, but as an English teacher, I’m terrified since it means that there’s a whole generation of French who have learned to say “on THE road a-GAIN.” Lavilliers is also interpreting the text differently, he’s stressing “again,” which turns the phrase into a lament instead of a celebration - but the stress on “the” is still inexcusable.

I’ve been contemplating this sort of thing a lot recently firstly because one of my colleagues in my computer music class, who is a rocker and is studying English because of his love of English-language music, was complaining to me one day about how the French lack of accentuation makes it nearly impossible to sing rock-n-roll in French, but more importantly, because I’m finishing up a setting of a French text (Les exercices de style by Raymond Queneau), and I’ve been thinking about how weird my setting must sound to a French speaker.

I’ll take one line:

The musically-created accents on this line are on “moi” and “pi-” I feel justified in accentuating the egoistic “moi” - “pour moi” is one of those extraneous formulations that provide emphasis. If you think about it, in English, you’d never say “for me, it’ll be a beer,” you’d say “I’ll have a beer,” with an emphasis on “I” to clarify your uniqueness. In French, you could say “je prends une bière,” but it would lack singularity. You’d have to add the “moi” somewhere to make yourself really clear. But emphasizing the object, picon, is totally an English-ism. And fundamentally, adding “pour moi” is enough emphasis, “moi” doesn’t need to be isolated as the highest note in the line and on a strong beat. I’ve overdone it, but coming from a language in which it would be strange not to emphasize something, it’s hard for me to hear it otherwise.

Problems setting a foreign-language text are nothing new - think of anything in Latin, the scene in Amadeus when Salieri translates the requiem for a dying Mozart is a nice illustration - and one of the explicit reasons I chose this text is its foreign-ness. I have a hard time connecting music with words, so a foreign text seemed like a good place to start. The fact that the text itself is 99 variations on a truly mundane story - Les exercices are about words as sounds much more than words as signifiers - made it perfect. But the problem of idiomatic setting is one that I hadn’t considered before I began. It might never have become an issue, except that the exercice (inattendu, if you’re keeping score) above happens to be a conversation between friends - so the way they speak matters more than if it were, like the initial story, narrated.

I don’t like to end with questions-into-the-void, but, anyone else had a problem like this? How did you deal?

(n.b. If you’re interested, my setting of three of Les exercices will be premiered on February 21 at Ascension Church - 221West 107th street in Manhattan. I don’t know exactly when yet…)