In class, we had a conversation concerning the rhythm and flow of a rapper’s style defining the artist’s talent, accenting the message in the lyrics, and creating a rhythmically entertaining and charged listening experience. The focuses in the study if Flow were:
Placement of rhyming syllables
Placement of accented syllables
The number of syllables per beat
The relationship between syntactic units and metric units
It was this last focus that reminded me of a popular poetic device called “enjambment”. This style serves to continue a syntactic unit on the following metric line for the sake of Flow or smoothness. The lyric continues the message without cutting short the syntactic phrase or elongating the metric line. Here I present two examples, because both are rather short and happen to be by the same composer.
Auri is a Finnish trio, created by Tuomas Holopainen, composer and pianist for the world renowned symphonic metal band Nightwish. The vocals are sung by his wife Joanna Kurkela, and string instrumentation is performed by his friend, Troy Donockley. The music in this band is inspired by a fictional side-character by the same name from Patrick Rothfuss’s trilogy, The Kingkiller Chronicle. In this narrative, the young but homeless Auri is an extremely eccentric yet intelligent person, familiar with the magics of the world and seeing people, things, and nature around her in a very different yet surreal manner – the source for much of the lyrics written by Holopainen.
"Night 13" is a great example of the purpose of the album as a whole. Holopainen describes the music as “rabbit hole music and celestial metal”. Below are the lyrics to the song, with highlighted portions reflecting an obvious continuation of a sentence without the intention of a natural pause (like using commas or the word “and”) while moving onto the next metrical line.
I walk to the echo of stars
All around me, under me
A bed made of curious cloth
A pillow from a crib
The skies are dark, all of them
Still comforting starlight
Pouring all over this new home
High above
Younger than yesterday
I feel no pain, no memory lost
Alone yet with everything
What is this space?
Goodnight to an old soul
Goodbye to life once lived
This is my island now
To live it once more
Not long now
This time, this weightless fall
The calming mothers call
Back in time; I'm cleansed and bare
And I see the light
Now I know
The next song, "The Space Between", actually starts off this album, and tells the story of someone who has been accepted as an honoured guest with the Edema Ruh, a travelling family of performers, actors and singers. At about 1 minute and 40 seconds into the song, during the repeat and extension of the chorus, there is the use of enjambment again.
Come with me
The vast unknown awaits for us to see
Something so deeply hidden, yet everscriven. So,
Come with me
I'll take you to the rings, I'll take you where
The sons and daughters of endlessness came to be
The use of enjambment in both of these songs creates smooth connectivity between two metric lines in a single syntactic unit, continuing to tell the story without being truncated and disturbed by the limitations of symmetrical musical phrase structure.