Singing a Haiku: Setting Poetry to Music in Hyperscore

We entered into our November Second Saturdays workshop with the aim of tackling a prompt that we had attempted once before – setting the words of a poem to rhythmic and melodic form in Hyperscore. New Harmony Line’s June Kinoshita brought a haiku by famed Japanese 17th-century poet, Matsuo Bashō. We hoped to evoke not only the literal syllabic form of each of the lines in our composition but also the meaning of each phrase, the feel and mood that it stirred in us when we read it. The poem, translated to English, reads:

In the autumn night
Breaking into the silence
Voices murmuring

Where to start?

The difficulty of setting words to music, how much time and creativity it takes, was evident to all of us before we even began – for one, we chose a haiku after having a previous session where we attempted the same process with a longer poem and found ourselves in over our heads! This time, to start, we took a short time to brainstorm descriptive words for the way the haiku made us feel, as a jumping off point for our composing process. Then, we started composing music to set to the words, going line by line.

A variety of challenges can rear their heads when setting existing poetry to music: the preexisting sonic qualities and rhythms of the words themselves may clash with melodic and rhythmic experimentation, while reproducing their spoken rhythm faithfully may produce an inconsistent metric feel that can be hard to unify into a coherent song structure. We bumped up against these dissonances ourselves several times while composing, and we decided to go in a spare, ambient choral-style direction where strict rhythmic coherence is less important.

The exciting thing about the style of open-ended composition we followed in this workshop is that anyone in our situation may have gone in an entirely different direction to address this dissonance, producing something uniquely wonderful according to their own tastes and judgments. Perhaps they wouldn’t have even addressed it, not even experiencing these tensions we ran into as problematic at all – that, too, would be perfectly valid! After all, a crucial aspect of music composition, especially the experimentation-first model championed by Hyperscore, is allowing oneself to first quiet the critical inner voice enough to allow a spirit of curiosity, play, and possibility to come forward. Putting aside presuppositions about what we think we like, what we think makes a good, bad, exciting, or boring piece of music, can help to open up surprising paths of spontaneous intuition.

The next time you sit down with Hyperscore, try asking yourself these questions, and actually give yourself the space to answer them thoughtfully: Do I like what I’m hearing? What feels exciting to me about this piece so far? Is there anything that called my attention in what I just listened to? What reaction did I have when I was listening to this? Is there any part of that reaction that I want to emphasize more? Do I still have the same goals for this piece as I did before I listened to this part, or have they shifted? Where do I want to go next with this? These questions can turn music composition into a choose-your-own-adventure of sorts, with lots of unexpected twists and turns. Give it a shot!

Collaborative composition in Hyperscore

In this workshop, we really leaned into this compositional model, following the create, listen, react guidelines we talk about when we recommend ways for people to engage with composing in Hyperscore. Our experience setting Bashō’s haiku to music also highlighted the power of collaborative composition that many Hyperscore users might experience when working with their classmates or friends. We tried out many different iterations of the themes we developed through experimentation, and many placements of those themes in the Sketch window. Sometimes we disagreed or had ambivalent feelings about what we were hearing, and in that space of trial and error we ended up creating something that no one of us would have created individually.

In our piece, each line of the haiku stood on its own as a kind of choral intonation, repeated into the cavernous space of the sparse Sketch window. Then, as the layers of these melodies became more dense, they came into conversation with one another in an interplay of harmony and rhythmic tension. For the way we conceived of our composition, each line of the haiku was independent, and yet contributed to a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. Such was our resulting composition – as are many compositions that have their basis in repeated motifs!

Noticing what a composition evokes for you, and then working out what to do next with others, is a challenging, rewarding, and deeply human process. Hyperscore’s capacity to reduce the barriers to entry into this collaborative artistic process for students at any level of experience means that more people’s interpretations can contribute to the layers of a composition made in this way. Hyperscore provides an additional venue for people to encounter each other’s creative visions, and be mutually transformed in interactions that can be deeply meaningful for a person at any age. We want that experience to be accessible to everyone.

View the full workshop, as well as an isolated recording of the full composition, below, and register for our free Second Saturdays composition workshops to take part in the process!

Featured photo by Dimka Nevedimka via Pexels