I wrote up the following a few weeks ago in a document I shared with our solstice group, which seems to independently parallel G Gordon Worley III’s points:
To- | morrow can be brighter than [1] to- | day, although the night is cold [2] the | stars may seem so very far a- | way… [3] But | courage, hope and reason burn, in | every mind, each lesson learned, [4] [5] | shining light to guide to our way, [6] | make tomorrow brighter than [7] to- | day....
It’s weird that the comma isn’t here, but rather 1 beat later.
The unnecessary syncopation on “night is cold” is all but guaranteed to throw people off.
If this is supposed to rhyme with “today” from before, it falls flat because “today” is not really at the end of the line, despite the way it’s written.
A rhyme is set up here with “burn”/”learned,” but there is no analogous rhyme in the first stanza.
It really feels like there should be an unstressed pickup syllable here, based on the expectation set by all the previous measures.
Same here.
The stanza should really end here, but it goes on for another measure. (A 9-measure phrase? Who does that?)
To clarify some of these points:
1 & 3: There’s a mismatch between the poetic grouping of words and the rhythmical grouping, which is probably why bgaesop stumbles at that spot. This mismatch is made obvious by writing out the words according to the rhythmical grouping, as above.
2: The “official” version has “night is cold” on a downbeat with the rhythm “16th, 8th, quarter”, which is a very unusual rhythm. Notice that in the live recording here, the group attempts the syncopated rhythm the first time, but stumbles into “the stars may seem...”, and then reverts to the much more natural rhythm “8th, 8th, dotted-8th” in all subsequent iterations.
7: Mozart’s Musical Joke makes fun of bad compositions by starting off with a 7-measure phrase. Phrases are usually in powers or 2 or “nice” composite numbers like 6 or 12; a large prime number like 7 is silly because it can’t be imagined as having any internal regularity. You could maybe get away with 9 if it can be thought of as 3 3-measure subphrases, but this song doesn’t do that.
In my opinion, a good singalong song must have very low or zero tolerance for any irregularities in rhyme or rhythm. In LW jargon, if you think of the song as a stream of data which people are trying to predict in real time, you want them to quickly form an accurate, low-Kolmogorov-complexity model of the whole song based on just a small amount of input at the beginning.
(I’ve always hated singing “the bombs” in the Star-Spangled Banner!)
I actually do have an alt-version of the first-half-of-the-chorus, which I think (somewhat accidentally) addresses the first half of these. (At the time the main thing I was trying to fix was making there be enough time to breath sufficiently in the chorus. In the process ran into the same “the phrasings are weirdly clumped together” thing). I may attempt to record a sample when I’m less busy in a few days.
One disagreement I might have with you and Gordon is that I think the difficulty setting for Brighter Than Today should be “medium”, rather than “low” – I think the early songs in the solstice should be very easy to sing (and agree we often fail at that), but that it’s okay to ramp up the difficulty over time, and it is better for the central anthem to make some sacrifices of perfectly easy singability for “interestingness.” (Of course, some people disagree with Brighter Than Today scoring well on “interestingness” or “poetry” either. But, just clarifying what goal I personally think makes sense to shoot for)
The target I had for the music here isn’t “folk songs you can sing perfectly on the first time.” It’s “Christmas Carols”, which are some mix of “pretty singalongable” but also kinda weird and novel and noticably different from many other songs you might sing, which I think is part of what gives them staying power. (Like, in Silent Night, how many syllables is the word “virgin” and could you predict that in advance on your first time through?)
heh, basically all of the things you note as problems are things that make me actively enjoy the song more! I find the enjambment & mild irregularities & unexpected rhymes clever and fun. agree they add complexity but also that it’s okay for this song to be a bit complex (though I’m somewhat biased towards cooler-and-more-complex things since I’m a choir-type person)
Wow! Thank you for explaining what I lack the musical training to!
(Almost all of my musical skill consists of writing parody lyrics and filk, so I have an ear for certain things in songs but no idea what’s going on other than being able to fit things to what I hear.)
I wrote up the following a few weeks ago in a document I shared with our solstice group, which seems to independently parallel G Gordon Worley III’s points:
To clarify some of these points:
1 & 3: There’s a mismatch between the poetic grouping of words and the rhythmical grouping, which is probably why bgaesop stumbles at that spot. This mismatch is made obvious by writing out the words according to the rhythmical grouping, as above.
2: The “official” version has “night is cold” on a downbeat with the rhythm “16th, 8th, quarter”, which is a very unusual rhythm. Notice that in the live recording here, the group attempts the syncopated rhythm the first time, but stumbles into “the stars may seem...”, and then reverts to the much more natural rhythm “8th, 8th, dotted-8th” in all subsequent iterations.
7: Mozart’s Musical Joke makes fun of bad compositions by starting off with a 7-measure phrase. Phrases are usually in powers or 2 or “nice” composite numbers like 6 or 12; a large prime number like 7 is silly because it can’t be imagined as having any internal regularity. You could maybe get away with 9 if it can be thought of as 3 3-measure subphrases, but this song doesn’t do that.
In my opinion, a good singalong song must have very low or zero tolerance for any irregularities in rhyme or rhythm. In LW jargon, if you think of the song as a stream of data which people are trying to predict in real time, you want them to quickly form an accurate, low-Kolmogorov-complexity model of the whole song based on just a small amount of input at the beginning.
(I’ve always hated singing “the bombs” in the Star-Spangled Banner!)
Thanks, this is a pretty helpful breakdown.
I actually do have an alt-version of the first-half-of-the-chorus, which I think (somewhat accidentally) addresses the first half of these. (At the time the main thing I was trying to fix was making there be enough time to breath sufficiently in the chorus. In the process ran into the same “the phrasings are weirdly clumped together” thing). I may attempt to record a sample when I’m less busy in a few days.
One disagreement I might have with you and Gordon is that I think the difficulty setting for Brighter Than Today should be “medium”, rather than “low” – I think the early songs in the solstice should be very easy to sing (and agree we often fail at that), but that it’s okay to ramp up the difficulty over time, and it is better for the central anthem to make some sacrifices of perfectly easy singability for “interestingness.” (Of course, some people disagree with Brighter Than Today scoring well on “interestingness” or “poetry” either. But, just clarifying what goal I personally think makes sense to shoot for)
The target I had for the music here isn’t “folk songs you can sing perfectly on the first time.” It’s “Christmas Carols”, which are some mix of “pretty singalongable” but also kinda weird and novel and noticably different from many other songs you might sing, which I think is part of what gives them staying power. (Like, in Silent Night, how many syllables is the word “virgin” and could you predict that in advance on your first time through?)
heh, basically all of the things you note as problems are things that make me actively enjoy the song more! I find the enjambment & mild irregularities & unexpected rhymes clever and fun. agree they add complexity but also that it’s okay for this song to be a bit complex (though I’m somewhat biased towards cooler-and-more-complex things since I’m a choir-type person)
Wow! Thank you for explaining what I lack the musical training to!
(Almost all of my musical skill consists of writing parody lyrics and filk, so I have an ear for certain things in songs but no idea what’s going on other than being able to fit things to what I hear.)