Jane Marshall

Jane Marshall (b. 1924) is a composer of choral music, a hymnist, poet and teacher. A longtime member of the Meadows School of the Arts theory faculty and the Sacred Music graduate faculty at Perkins School of Theology at SMU, she is now teaching in the summer continuing education program there and is active as a clinician for choral organizations around the country.

A distinguished alumna of SMU, Jane has been honored twice by the Southern Baptist Musicians Conference and recently by the Fellowship of United Methodist Musicians for her contributions to church music.

She is the author of Grace, Noted, a collection of homilies, essays and hymns published by Hope Publishing Company. She and clergyman/poet John Thornburg have collaborated in two newly released hymn collections titled Can God Be Seen in Other Ways, published by Abingdon Music Press, and What Gift Can We Bring, published by Wayne Leupold Editions.

Jane and her husband Elbert Marshall, who was an engineer with Texas Instruments for thirty-eight years, have three children.

What Tools Build a Composition?

Before pen is ever put to paper buy a composer, there are the givens of motivation, training, and listening to reckon with. The first includes at least the following: 1) having a musical gene, 2) knowing whom we are writing for or for what occasion, and 3) acquaintance with, even love of, pitches, harmonies and rhythms - best found by exploring early the piano or guitar, since these furnish possibilities for discovering how the elements mesh to form a whole.

Training varies. Some who compose learn to do it by doing, having fiddled around with the above three elements just for the pure fun of it. Those trained formally have probably done the same thing but followed it with a good piano teacher and courses in counterpoint and harmony (hopefully in that order), music history, form and analysis, modal scales, and all the other curriculum items that help enhance musicality and knowledge.

Listening to music of all kinds should top anything already mentioned above and should continue throughout a composer’s (and a conductor’s) working life. David Ahlstrom, formerly a composer-teacher at Southern Methodist University, used to tell his students that if they wanted to write a cello piece, they should listen to as many good, and well-performed, cello compositions as they could find. This is not for copying purposes but for seeing what a master has done with the tools of the trade. With today’s rich trove of pieces in all styles to hear in a concert venue or on recordings, there is no reason not to take advantage of the teaching power within them.

That said, the task of writing begins. Methods vary with composers, but mainly in the order they’re used. Since I write primarily choral music, accompanied and unaccompanied, there will be a particular focus to my method, but the basics will be similar to those most composers follow, I feel sure. One thing is constant for me in writing music to be sung: having the text studied and understood comes first, for it helps dictate what the music should do.

Then comes the appropriate melodic idea, determined by the text and occasion, possibly by what group is to sing the piece. Nobody requesting a setting of a confessional prayer is going to be happy with a patriotic barn-burner.

Setting notes to words requires decisions about text. What vowels are difficult at what pitches? What phrases don’t “fit in the mouth”? If the text is contemporary, is it in the current language base, avoiding archaic words that would be better suited to the nineteenth century or before? Is the style appropriate: no cute words or phrases, no clichés? If figures of speech, like metaphors and alliterations, are used, are they used with taste, accuracy and restraint?

Carlton Young and Alice Parker, both successful choral composers, have confirmed that they take the next step just as I do. I type the text out so I can go over it and decide where the important emphases are, what form it might suggest for the music, and what actual note values and accents might be possibilities. I don’t try to determine a meter or pitches or insert bar lines among the values I write at that side of each line until I finish this step. There may be no consistent meter. Text emphasis is everything in determining both pitches and rhythm, allowing bar lines to fall naturally. Sometimes, syllables are emphasized by stress, sometimes by length; and phrases frequently shape a contour of speech inflection. Both suggest where pitches and rhythms should go and what they should do to best reflect the meaning and mood of the text. Now may be the best time to decide whether the text is most effectively sung in unison or in parts, though that can change as the piece takes shape.

Mood can be successfully reflected in the way the melody is harmonized and what scale or mode is used, a process that still lies in the pitch department. Such fine-tuning of words and phrases is not necessary in writing wordless music, but mood certainly is; so the basic elements of melody, harmony, rhythm and form remain the tools of the trade, with tempo and dynamics thoughtfully keeping them company. All this text consideration happens in my process before a note is sounded by mind, voice or keyboard.

One more consideration: Will the setting include accompaniment or is it meant for a cappella singing?

Then come the notes themselves, placed within a form: is the text in one section or more? If the answer is more, which sections will be in contrast to the initial one? How will they vary? by key or mode? by style? by meter change? The choices are endless.

So it’s time to concoct a melodic idea, a theme if the text is lengthy, a motif if short, the choice of key made – subject to change as the melody develops in the mind. Again, I let the text tell me how best to arrange the pitches, what sounds are most appropriate to range, vocality and mood of the words, where the highs and lows should be, and what form the melody will take. Bar lines and meter signatures usually can wait till the melody is secure, though sometimes a bit of harmonizing may force me to change my mind about a few notes of melody, so long as the word emphasis is not minimized.

Harmonization follows, once the decision is made as to whether melody, harmony, or rhythm – or some pair of these – is the most important element of the music. In the unison American folk tune, Three Blind Mice, melody and rhythm dominate. One would be hard put to harmonize every note, and doing so would be a corruption of the text and tune and slow down an appropriate tempo. The chords would be simple, made of triads that would not detract; most of these built on the first, fifth, and fourth tones of the scale; in other words, on tonic, dominant and subdominant. They could occur mostly on the first and third beats in the first half of the 4/4 melody, perhaps three times in the later measures. In such a short tune, change of key wouldn’t be an option, nor would ornamentation.

One discipline I use is to write simply a unison bass line to assure economy and good two-part counterpoint between the outer voices, melody and bass note. The fewer inner notes the better after that.

A Bach-harmonized chorale, however, like the Passion Chorale O Sacred Head Now Wounded, from the Baroque period, illustrates how effective a full four-part harmonization can be at the hands of a master. Because the tempo is slower, the style stately, there is room for many passing tones and suspensions, particularly in the inner voices. Every section of the choir has an interesting part to sing. The result is a richness that expresses magnificently the style and mood of the tune and text.

A simpler harmonization but an exquisite one in a more contemporary style can be seen in Durufle’s The Lord’s Prayer (Theodore Presser, 1978). The Brahms motet in five parts, Create in Me a Clean Heart, O God (G. Schrimer, 1931 – now Hal Leonard) is another gem, this one from the Romantic period.

The examples above are written for unaccompanied singing, but one would not think of Mozart’s soprano solo Laudate Dominum from his Vespers being sung without accompaniment by either an orchestra or keyboard. Whatever style is used, the aim is not to overwhelm the vocal line with a texture of notes too thick.

I prefer to get the notes and rhythms down in the vocal parts in some sort of formal structure before I decide on the exact tempi and dynamics. I need the whole in front of me before I have a sense of what the dynamics, tempi, and other editing indications should be. That’s simply what has worked for me, but others may choose to put final the editing instructions when they compose the notes.

I would suggest following David Ahlstrom’s advice, whatever style of music you wish to write. Find excellent pieces in that style and study their scores to see what the composers did that made those pieces work. As Alice Parker says, composition’s purpose is not primarily putting notes on a page and calling it finished when the last note is written, but to create a work that can be translated into beautiful and effective sound by performers who transmit your notes is such a way that listeners are engaged and transformed.

Jane Marshall