October 30, 2025

🎼 October 2025: Fittingness

On musical adaptation of other art, especially text setting—why it is hard and how to do it better.

Happy end of October, everyone! In this issue:

• On fittingness when adapting art from one medium to another
• Ephraim Radner
• Camille Pépin
• A significant symphony status update

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🎼 On the craft

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A few weeks ago, listening to a musical adaptation of another piece of art—I’ll leave the details aside because they aren’t particularly relevant—I was struck again by the question of fittingness. That is: whether and how the music suited the piece being adapted. Does it, like a piece of clothing, fit well or not? Ill-fitting pieces of clothing can make the most attractive people look goofy or obscure their best attributes; and by contrast attire that fits well can bring out the best of people’s appearance.

The same is true of any kind of artistic adaptation of a work from one medium into another. Consider the example of depicting a scene from a story with a painting. The way one paints a scene from Hamlet ought to differ from how one paints a scene from Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, which ought to differ again from how one might depict a scene from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which ought to differ yet again from an illustration for Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and so on. There are many fitting ways to paint each of those scenes, and one could paint any of them using the same medium (oil, e.g.), but they certainly should not look the same.

These days, I most frequently encounter the question of musical fittingness at church. Most contemporary worship music does a very poor job of text setting—that is, of matching the music to the text. The two most common failures of text-setting I hear are:

• Settings with a mismatch between what the words suggest and what the music suggests. For example, setting the word “highest” as the middle or bottom of a descending line, or “depths” at or near the top of a melodic line, and so on.
• Settings that place melodic or prosodic emphasis (and sometimes both!) on secondary or supporting words—often articles like “a” or “the”—rather than the most important words in the poetic text: the subjects and objects and verbs.

Now, a sophisticated composer might choose to do those kinds of things for a specific artistic effect. Working musically contrary to the direct or natural verbal sense of a poetic passage can be a way of doing something more interesting, of surprising the audience by going somewhere unexpected. That kind of thing done well can highlight and illuminate subtext or meta text for the audience. One could also satirize or undermine a text musically by way of mismatched text setting. As with any deconstructive artistic moves, though, that sort of thing only works if there is something to deconstruct. It also does not do away with the need for fittingness! Something about either the text or the composer’s intent toward it must warrant the move. Ironizing one artwork with another requires a particularly deft touch and good judgment; else it devolves into mere cynicism.

In any case, the authors of the kinds of church music I encounter are certainly not intending to ironize the texts they set. Quite the opposite! They are, rather, merely ignorant of the principles of text setting.¹ This is not a purely contemporary phenomenon, either. Plenty of hymns have been set to tunes that fit them poorly. Indeed, the more strictly metrical texts of many hymns makes it easy to set them to any metrically corresponding melody and harmony—even if the metrics or the musical motion undercuts the text. Stronger poetry and richer music is not a guarantee of fittingness. Ironically, it may only heighten the mismatch between the two.

What makes this particularly difficult is that there is no recipe. You certainly shouldn’t make a habit out of bottoming out your descending musical phrases on the words “highest” or “heaven” or “above”. “Take your melodic and harmonic progressions upward with ‘up’ words and downward with ‘down’ words” is a fine starting point—but not necessarily a very good or sophisticated endpoint. Applying those heuristics without reflection and care, you can easily end up with the same problem as a lot of contemporary film music: offering nothing beyond the text. (Still, it would be better than the baseline: At least the music would not contradict or undermine the text!) There are plenty of other questions to answer, too, though. What does the text of a hymn make of humanity? of God? of sin? of salvation? How can the music help the singers feel the things the text is aiming poetically to convey?

I have been speaking of hymns and worship music here because I think on this dynamic at least weekly in the context of church music. But of course the same is true of any musical setting of any text. If the text is lightly ironic, sincere symphonic bombast is likely not the right accompaniment. Symphonic bombast could be deployed ironically; it would require, though, sufficient skill and judiciousness as a composer that the audience would “get it”, would understand the gesture as a kind of musical wink.

“Skill and judiciousness” are, of course, a decent stand-in for much of what makes up maturity in any craft, including but certainly not limited to the fine arts. (They are equally good descriptors for what makes a good senior software engineer!) The need for skill and judiciousness implies the need to practice, to develop good judgment and the competence to accomplish one’s interpretive aims. Whether setting a theological poem to music or any other such adaptation, we must consider the fittingness of the two, and work hard at it.

I’d love to hear from you in replies or the comments: What pieces of musical adaption do you love for the way they particularly suit the original work? What are other artistic adaptions from one medium to another—paintings of literature, film adaptations of books, poems inspired by statuary, you name it—that have similarly exemplified “fittingness”?

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For more on this, you might enjoy the discussion of choreography, interpretation, and fittingness around Kristi McCauley’s aerial silks performance of my Fanfare for a New Era of American Spaceflight in April 2024:

The discussion starting at 14:51 deals quite explicitly with these exact challenges for translation across media!

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🎵 Other notes

1.

Ephraim Radner’s essay The Substance of Our Lives pulls together music, Ivan Illich, poverty, mental illness, love, Edward Elgar, and—above all—what it means to be a “neighbor” in the terms Jesus famously answered that question, “Who is my neighbor?”

2.

My word: Camille Pépin’s Laniakea and La Source d’Yggdrasil—both appearing on the album Les Eaux célestes—are wonderful.

So is her Aether, concerto pour harpe, marimba et orchestre, conducted on a 2023 recording by Chloé Dufresne, the new music director at our local Colorado Springs Philharmonic—who introduced us all to Pépin’s work at the concert opener. What a delightful surprise it was to discover her involvement with the recording of Aether!

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🎤 Links, updates, &c.

Last month, I said I hoped to be back with news about finishing a draft of the third movement of the symphony I am working on. Well: I did! This was one of my two big goals for the year—the other being to record and publish some other piece of music, which I did with Holy Saturday back in April. The movement is not done, of course. As with writing a novel, the first draft is in many ways just the first step along a longer road to a completed piece—but it is a very large first step. I am thus still on track for my goal for this: to have a version of it I am happy with by the time I turn 40: a little over year and a half from now in June 2027.

The mockup of the symphony currently stands at just over 32 minutes, with includes completed drafts of movements I, II, and III and some decent working material for movement IV—

• I: 12:35
• II: 8:17
• III: 8:54
• IV: 2:21

I don’t yet have a strong sense of the shape of that fourth movement, so I don’t know exactly where the work as a whole will land. Best guess: somewhere in the 36–40 minute range as mocked up. (Any performance time would vary depending on the conductor’s choices.) That assumes 4–8 minutes of music to write for that last movement, and no major changes to the durations of earlier movements. Both assumptions may not hold, of course! I think it unlikely I will go longer than that, and if it ends up meaningfully shorter it will be because I found material to cut or abbreviate.

Between now and the end of the year, I plan to do some revision work on all three drafted movements between now. I will also almost certainly write something totally different as a kind of “palette cleanser”. Perhaps some church music, perhaps some chamber music, perhaps something else that catches my attention.

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👋🏼 Happy October!

We’re in the home stretch of 2025! I hope November is lovely for you. Look for the next issue sometime after (American) Thanksgiving!