Re: Fantasy III contest

[Hanno Behrens <shaftoe nurfuerspam de>]

Am Donnerstag, 13. März 2008 schrieb Stefan Westerfeld:
>    Hi!
>
> On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 11:19:29AM +0100, Hanno Behrens wrote:
> > Das sieht gut aus. Der Text ist etwas schwierig vom Timing her. Das hat
> > kein Musiker geschrieben, sondern jemand, der von Rhythmus nicht so viel
> > Ahnung hat. Mal sehen, ob ich einen Weg da reinfinde.
>
> Well in fact the text was written by a group of seven musicians. We choose
> a topic randomly from a set of topics, and we also choose the length of the
> verses from the set [5,12] randomly. Thus we had

Oh, yes. I did not mean to bash the writers of the lines. There will be 
problems with this poem. I'll explain it below. 

> Topic: the purpose of life
> Scheme:
>
> A12 Wer weiß, wohin des Schicksals Odem uns verweht.
> B6  Das weiß der weise Wind.
> B6  Keinen Ausweg ich find?.
> A12 Macht, Ruhm, Reichtum, Feinde, Freunde - alles vergeht.
> B6  Philosophen, Katastrophen - Neues entsteht.
> B6  Ich vertrau' dir nicht blind.

All right. 

The problem that I see, and why I -with a lack of diplomatics- said it will be 
difficult is, that on first sight you can see, that there is a clear sentence 
melody in "Wer weiß..." but on the other A12 there is just a hammering of 
subjects like "Macht, Ruhm,..." While the syllabies are the same the melody 
of the sentence is unmatchable. That was just the first thought in mind when 
I saw the lines. 

First solution would be to smear the whole thing down to a soft "esoteric" 
sound without explicit rhythm. But I think, thats a bad way. This two lines 
are unmatchable. There cant be the same melody on them. Only the end of the 
A12 lines are matching. Its even worse. The words "Macht, Ruhm, Reichtum,..." 
are all very strong words which have to pronounced with high intensity, if 
you don't want to smear them and lose their meaning. On the other hand the 
first A12 is poetical. It has to be soft and emotional for to be believable.

I think my first reaction to the lines are now better understandable. I just 
saw this and typed out the response without thinking. It was the very first 
impression. By the way - I still think this impression was right. 

Which does not mean, that we cant make something of this. Its possible I 
think, but it will be difficult. For a good song, I mean, one of the greatest 
problems will be the solution for this two lines to match without smearing 
them down to goo. 

To solve this poetic puzzle you really have to be creative. 

with best regards
Hanno