Writing Preposed Songs for Concerts

When writing songs for a concert, your preparations are for being the center of attention for a short period of time. This is different from a gather or ball, where music should last for a far longer period and remain part of the background. The difference shows mainly in the speed and length of the song. At a gather or ball, you want to average, at most, one pose for each pose of each person in the crowd. At a concert, you want to pose just a bit more slowly than people can read. Be sure to have someone else check your speed before using it; when you are accustomed to the song, it takes less time to read it.

The easiest way to perform a song for a concert is to have it prewritten and stored in a songbook/instrument -- a child of #1599. To create an instrument called Foobie's Gitar, type @create #1599 named "Foobie's Gitar", fg. The , fg adds fg as an alias. This means, essentially, that you can type fg when you mean Foobie's Gitar, and the MOO will understand what you mean. If your instrument is Foo's Harp, you should probably use fh as an alias rather than fg. ;) Once you have your instrument, type help fg (assuming you have fg as an alias) to get a help file on writing and storing songs. Be forewarned; it's spammy.

Reminders about basic posing courtesy: be sure to spell-check and edit your song. A concert is a formal occasion, and with prewritten poses, it's that much simpler to avoid mistakes. There's no excuse for gross spelling errors or typos; you have time to work on the songs before the concert. To fix errors, use the noteditor. To edit chapter 1 in a songbook, it's just @notedit songbook.chapter1

A few guidelines, now, for lyrics and musical poses. We'll start with lyrics. If you read the lyrics to some of the popular songs of today, you'll see that they sound much less musical without the music. The rhythm of the words is far more important in a text-based medium, where your "listeners" can't hear the rhythm and tune that go with the lyrics. To make words sound like lyrics, you have to give them a heavier beat and rhythm than might be necessary in an actual song. A good way to test is whether the lyrics can comfortably be read in a sing-song. If you have to force them into a sing-song rhythm, it may need some revisions. For online lyrics, that rhythm is more important than rhyme. It hits the subconscious for the listener and makes them more willing to accept the words as music.

Remember, also, to keep lyrics Pern-appropriate. This is in both large and small details. Large details would include not talking about earth technology or magic, which aren't canon for Pern. Small details include vocabulary slips; say 'turns' instead of 'years', or 'candlemarks' instead of 'hours'. These are slips that are frequently made in songs, and which jar away from the mood by small amounts.

Poses are a bit trickier to talk about; the problems you run into are more subtle. There are two main points to remember: keep it accessible and avoid powerplaying. By keeping it accessible, I mean not building poses so technically detailed that no one without years of music experience could comprehend it. An example of this would be:

As her fingers touch the harpstrings, a quiet A minor chord drifts out, modulating upwards through a slow glissando into a faintly dissonant chord build around the framework of an augmented F triad.

If the reader doesn't know what a minor chord sounds like, or how to envision a glissando, or what an augmented F triad is, he will be completely unable to understand the mood you're aiming to create. To describe only the sound, you might pose something like:

Her fingers touch the harpstrings, coaxing out a quiet, eerily melancholy tone. It slides up, note by note, to fall into a sound whose melancholy is diminished despite a more eerie, out-of-place feeling.

However, that one might seem a bit vague to those listeners who /do/ have musical experience. The best option is to find a middle ground, which describes your actions better to those who might understand it, but leaves enough for those people who don't understand musical jargon:

Her fingers touch the harpstrings with barely enough force to call out a quiet chord, an eerily melancholy A minor which ripples upwards through a slow glissando. It ends with a resolution into a mildly jarring dissonance build around the notes of an augmented F triad.

Powerplaying is another easy trap to fall into with music. People like to give images to go with their music, especially if they do not have the technical experience to give many details. If you are building scenes around extended metaphors, it's important to avoid telling people what they are thinking as they listen. Don't pose that the music calls to mind a dragon's protective curl around her eggs. What if one of the listeners has a phobia of dragons? Don't tell the person what their character is thinking.

Describing the sounds through analogies is used commonly, and is more acceptable as a concept. To use the dragon analogy, you could pose something like: The bassoon rises with a slow rumble, a gold dragon curled around her clutch of melody and countermelody, which grows to something like maturity inside the slow, rhythmic comfort of the bassoon's notes. This gives, without powerplay, the same image as: As the bassoon rises, you are reminded of a gold dragon curling around her clutch. The instrument offers the same nurturing support to the orchestra, giving it the protection it needs to flourish and mature.

That distinction is one of the harder ones to master, but one of the more important. It detracts from the experience of listening to a song to be told what to think halfway through, and that includes forced mental images as much as it does phrases like: The music calms you or, worse: You are stunned and awed by the music.

Basically, the same things apply to musical poses as apply to other poses, with a few more dangers lurking: Be courteous about powerplaying and keep your poses understandable.

(This is intended as a helpfile for prewritten songs in a text-based roleplaying environment. If you wish to copy or link to it, feel free, but please drop me a line at harperbuilder@aol.com to let me know. Thanks.)