Music By Baudelaire

 

"Composers were fascinated by Baudelaire’s poetry, as it so closely resembled music. Disciplined in technique, clear in structure, and highly descriptive in terms of imagery, his poetry held great appeal for musicians and composers alike." https://interlude.hk/charles-baudelaire-1821-1867-i-have-cultivated-my-hysteria-with-pleasure-and-terror/

 

There's nothing more earthy than to sit down with an existing poem and set it to music while strumming a guitar. 

I chose the first verse of Music by Charles Baudelaire, and became a bit of a sea chantey. (The other stanzas don't sound particularly musical).

Music doth uplift me like a sea

Towards my planet pale,

Then through the dark fogs or heaven's infinity

I lift my wandering sail.

My process of translating the music in language to composed music is to find the rhythms in the language first, then map a melody, then harmonize.

You can go a step further and map new words in place of Baudelaire's, add other verses, a chorus and so on.

Here's the second draft based on the same chord changes, now with the new title Waiting For Life, which uses an errant phrase I had in my lyric diary:

She waited for permission

She waited for her life

When it arrived

It was never quite right

 

 

I would imagine that AI can do this kind of mapping, but it's six and one-half dozen of the other, and it's more fun and interesting to do it manually because you get to make music hands-on instead of the hands-off way by writing code to make music.

There are in fact apps that attempt to do this, with one being LyricJam

I have found these tools somewhat useful if I'm looking for a vibe, but part of the work that's involved in songwriting is finding language and mapping it over the rhythms in the music. Very often in pop songs the words don't really matter; they are merely placeholders or words that are easy to sing. Sometimes meaning is an emergent property of random permutations.

Here’s the first draft of Music (On Musescore)