I know I complain every year, but I wish we could fix “Brighter Than Today” so that it was easier to sing. There’s some weird things about the melody and the prosody. For example, folks trip up on the middle line of this part of the chorus because something changes (not exactly the time signature, but you have to say the words faster to fit them in and it feels like you have to rush to get them in):
Tomorrow can be brighter than today, although the night is cold…. the stars may seem so very far away...
It happens in a weird way that sounds off every time to me. There’s also some surprises singing the verses where it’s not clear you have to hold a particular note or not.
Sorry if this isn’t very helpful since I just keep complaining, and I’m not a good enough song writer to really fix it. I just know this song is full of things that make my brain go “ERROR! ERROR!” every time we try to sing it.
Maybe as an exercise, if I can find the time, I should try to write something like a new version of the song that carries the same message but fits a standard meter so we can fit the lyrics to many melodies and try things out.
When you say “folks trip up on the middle line”, can you say more about what your observations are? (i.e. concretely, how many other people have you seen having trouble?)
I’m totally down with “Solstice songs can be improved”, but I haven’t heard any other complaints about this song, and more positive comments on the song than any other solstice song. I definitely support you experimenting with it, but, I do predict if you ran a solstice with a different version you’d get a lot of annoyed people and not many people who are like ‘that was an improvement.’
(I realize that’s largely due to cultural lock-in. And the more fair question would [normally] be “in another 10 years, would the overall solstice enjoyment be higher after people had time to get over being upset at the changes.” I think there are probably optimizations to Brighter Than Today that could be made but it’s a particularly costly song to change)
I’m not sure quite how to explain it other than people say the words at the wrong time relative to the melody because they get lost because of changes in where words fall relative to beats. My guess is you don’t notice this much because you’re not often in the audience near folks who may be hearing the song for only the first or second time.
I’m also acutely aware of the issue because I struggle with the song. I can hear how it’s supposed to sound and it’s very hard to make myself sing it correctly so that it doesn’t sound like I’m doing that thing where you get a little lost in a song and have to catch up, like during karaoke.
Nod. There is definitely a thing where the people nearby me have a pretty different music experience (both because of selection effects on where I sit, and because I’m singing fairly confidently so people around me have an easier time). But, I was mostly basing my existing opinion off the feedback form. That has it’s own set of biases, but we do have ~9 years of it now which I think counts for something.
My question was some thing like “what percentage of people around you seem to having a hard time”, and “are there any of them you know of who’d be willing to chat about their experience.”
(I also, like, don’t think it’s necessarily that bad if people don’t sing the song perfectly on their 1st or 2nd time, as long as their subjective experience is good. I’d want to see a second person say explicitly “yes, please change the song to make it easier” before it seemed worth changing, since the cost of changing is pretty high)
I wrote up the following a few weeks ago in a document I shared with our solstice group, which seems to independently parallel G Gordon Worley III’s points:
To- | morrow can be brighter than [1] to- | day, although the night is cold [2] the | stars may seem so very far a- | way… [3] But | courage, hope and reason burn, in | every mind, each lesson learned, [4] [5] | shining light to guide to our way, [6] | make tomorrow brighter than [7] to- | day....
It’s weird that the comma isn’t here, but rather 1 beat later.
The unnecessary syncopation on “night is cold” is all but guaranteed to throw people off.
If this is supposed to rhyme with “today” from before, it falls flat because “today” is not really at the end of the line, despite the way it’s written.
A rhyme is set up here with “burn”/”learned,” but there is no analogous rhyme in the first stanza.
It really feels like there should be an unstressed pickup syllable here, based on the expectation set by all the previous measures.
Same here.
The stanza should really end here, but it goes on for another measure. (A 9-measure phrase? Who does that?)
To clarify some of these points:
1 & 3: There’s a mismatch between the poetic grouping of words and the rhythmical grouping, which is probably why bgaesop stumbles at that spot. This mismatch is made obvious by writing out the words according to the rhythmical grouping, as above.
2: The “official” version has “night is cold” on a downbeat with the rhythm “16th, 8th, quarter”, which is a very unusual rhythm. Notice that in the live recording here, the group attempts the syncopated rhythm the first time, but stumbles into “the stars may seem...”, and then reverts to the much more natural rhythm “8th, 8th, dotted-8th” in all subsequent iterations.
7: Mozart’s Musical Joke makes fun of bad compositions by starting off with a 7-measure phrase. Phrases are usually in powers or 2 or “nice” composite numbers like 6 or 12; a large prime number like 7 is silly because it can’t be imagined as having any internal regularity. You could maybe get away with 9 if it can be thought of as 3 3-measure subphrases, but this song doesn’t do that.
In my opinion, a good singalong song must have very low or zero tolerance for any irregularities in rhyme or rhythm. In LW jargon, if you think of the song as a stream of data which people are trying to predict in real time, you want them to quickly form an accurate, low-Kolmogorov-complexity model of the whole song based on just a small amount of input at the beginning.
(I’ve always hated singing “the bombs” in the Star-Spangled Banner!)
I actually do have an alt-version of the first-half-of-the-chorus, which I think (somewhat accidentally) addresses the first half of these. (At the time the main thing I was trying to fix was making there be enough time to breath sufficiently in the chorus. In the process ran into the same “the phrasings are weirdly clumped together” thing). I may attempt to record a sample when I’m less busy in a few days.
One disagreement I might have with you and Gordon is that I think the difficulty setting for Brighter Than Today should be “medium”, rather than “low” – I think the early songs in the solstice should be very easy to sing (and agree we often fail at that), but that it’s okay to ramp up the difficulty over time, and it is better for the central anthem to make some sacrifices of perfectly easy singability for “interestingness.” (Of course, some people disagree with Brighter Than Today scoring well on “interestingness” or “poetry” either. But, just clarifying what goal I personally think makes sense to shoot for)
The target I had for the music here isn’t “folk songs you can sing perfectly on the first time.” It’s “Christmas Carols”, which are some mix of “pretty singalongable” but also kinda weird and novel and noticably different from many other songs you might sing, which I think is part of what gives them staying power. (Like, in Silent Night, how many syllables is the word “virgin” and could you predict that in advance on your first time through?)
heh, basically all of the things you note as problems are things that make me actively enjoy the song more! I find the enjambment & mild irregularities & unexpected rhymes clever and fun. agree they add complexity but also that it’s okay for this song to be a bit complex (though I’m somewhat biased towards cooler-and-more-complex things since I’m a choir-type person)
Wow! Thank you for explaining what I lack the musical training to!
(Almost all of my musical skill consists of writing parody lyrics and filk, so I have an ear for certain things in songs but no idea what’s going on other than being able to fit things to what I hear.)
(while I stand by the previous comment, I sure do note that just today the LW team was working on learning the song, and it sure was an issue that the syllable-emphasis/rhythm is a bit variable and there’s multiple “reasonable choices” about how to sing it. Definitely do agree the phenomenon you’re pointing at is significant)
I know I complain every year, but I wish we could fix “Brighter Than Today” so that it was easier to sing. There’s some weird things about the melody and the prosody. For example, folks trip up on the middle line of this part of the chorus because something changes (not exactly the time signature, but you have to say the words faster to fit them in and it feels like you have to rush to get them in):
It happens in a weird way that sounds off every time to me. There’s also some surprises singing the verses where it’s not clear you have to hold a particular note or not.
Sorry if this isn’t very helpful since I just keep complaining, and I’m not a good enough song writer to really fix it. I just know this song is full of things that make my brain go “ERROR! ERROR!” every time we try to sing it.
Maybe as an exercise, if I can find the time, I should try to write something like a new version of the song that carries the same message but fits a standard meter so we can fit the lyrics to many melodies and try things out.
When you say “folks trip up on the middle line”, can you say more about what your observations are? (i.e. concretely, how many other people have you seen having trouble?)
I’m totally down with “Solstice songs can be improved”, but I haven’t heard any other complaints about this song, and more positive comments on the song than any other solstice song. I definitely support you experimenting with it, but, I do predict if you ran a solstice with a different version you’d get a lot of annoyed people and not many people who are like ‘that was an improvement.’
(I realize that’s largely due to cultural lock-in. And the more fair question would [normally] be “in another 10 years, would the overall solstice enjoyment be higher after people had time to get over being upset at the changes.” I think there are probably optimizations to Brighter Than Today that could be made but it’s a particularly costly song to change)
I’m not sure quite how to explain it other than people say the words at the wrong time relative to the melody because they get lost because of changes in where words fall relative to beats. My guess is you don’t notice this much because you’re not often in the audience near folks who may be hearing the song for only the first or second time.
I’m also acutely aware of the issue because I struggle with the song. I can hear how it’s supposed to sound and it’s very hard to make myself sing it correctly so that it doesn’t sound like I’m doing that thing where you get a little lost in a song and have to catch up, like during karaoke.
Nod. There is definitely a thing where the people nearby me have a pretty different music experience (both because of selection effects on where I sit, and because I’m singing fairly confidently so people around me have an easier time). But, I was mostly basing my existing opinion off the feedback form. That has it’s own set of biases, but we do have ~9 years of it now which I think counts for something.
My question was some thing like “what percentage of people around you seem to having a hard time”, and “are there any of them you know of who’d be willing to chat about their experience.”
(I also, like, don’t think it’s necessarily that bad if people don’t sing the song perfectly on their 1st or 2nd time, as long as their subjective experience is good. I’d want to see a second person say explicitly “yes, please change the song to make it easier” before it seemed worth changing, since the cost of changing is pretty high)
I wrote up the following a few weeks ago in a document I shared with our solstice group, which seems to independently parallel G Gordon Worley III’s points:
To clarify some of these points:
1 & 3: There’s a mismatch between the poetic grouping of words and the rhythmical grouping, which is probably why bgaesop stumbles at that spot. This mismatch is made obvious by writing out the words according to the rhythmical grouping, as above.
2: The “official” version has “night is cold” on a downbeat with the rhythm “16th, 8th, quarter”, which is a very unusual rhythm. Notice that in the live recording here, the group attempts the syncopated rhythm the first time, but stumbles into “the stars may seem...”, and then reverts to the much more natural rhythm “8th, 8th, dotted-8th” in all subsequent iterations.
7: Mozart’s Musical Joke makes fun of bad compositions by starting off with a 7-measure phrase. Phrases are usually in powers or 2 or “nice” composite numbers like 6 or 12; a large prime number like 7 is silly because it can’t be imagined as having any internal regularity. You could maybe get away with 9 if it can be thought of as 3 3-measure subphrases, but this song doesn’t do that.
In my opinion, a good singalong song must have very low or zero tolerance for any irregularities in rhyme or rhythm. In LW jargon, if you think of the song as a stream of data which people are trying to predict in real time, you want them to quickly form an accurate, low-Kolmogorov-complexity model of the whole song based on just a small amount of input at the beginning.
(I’ve always hated singing “the bombs” in the Star-Spangled Banner!)
Thanks, this is a pretty helpful breakdown.
I actually do have an alt-version of the first-half-of-the-chorus, which I think (somewhat accidentally) addresses the first half of these. (At the time the main thing I was trying to fix was making there be enough time to breath sufficiently in the chorus. In the process ran into the same “the phrasings are weirdly clumped together” thing). I may attempt to record a sample when I’m less busy in a few days.
One disagreement I might have with you and Gordon is that I think the difficulty setting for Brighter Than Today should be “medium”, rather than “low” – I think the early songs in the solstice should be very easy to sing (and agree we often fail at that), but that it’s okay to ramp up the difficulty over time, and it is better for the central anthem to make some sacrifices of perfectly easy singability for “interestingness.” (Of course, some people disagree with Brighter Than Today scoring well on “interestingness” or “poetry” either. But, just clarifying what goal I personally think makes sense to shoot for)
The target I had for the music here isn’t “folk songs you can sing perfectly on the first time.” It’s “Christmas Carols”, which are some mix of “pretty singalongable” but also kinda weird and novel and noticably different from many other songs you might sing, which I think is part of what gives them staying power. (Like, in Silent Night, how many syllables is the word “virgin” and could you predict that in advance on your first time through?)
heh, basically all of the things you note as problems are things that make me actively enjoy the song more! I find the enjambment & mild irregularities & unexpected rhymes clever and fun. agree they add complexity but also that it’s okay for this song to be a bit complex (though I’m somewhat biased towards cooler-and-more-complex things since I’m a choir-type person)
Wow! Thank you for explaining what I lack the musical training to!
(Almost all of my musical skill consists of writing parody lyrics and filk, so I have an ear for certain things in songs but no idea what’s going on other than being able to fit things to what I hear.)
(while I stand by the previous comment, I sure do note that just today the LW team was working on learning the song, and it sure was an issue that the syllable-emphasis/rhythm is a bit variable and there’s multiple “reasonable choices” about how to sing it. Definitely do agree the phenomenon you’re pointing at is significant)
As someone who has very meager singing ability, I stumble over the transition from “today” to “although”
Interesting! When I listen back to live recordings I don’t hear people messing up at that point. Ex: https://www.jefftk.com/solstice-2022/solstice-2022-08-brighter.mp3 (and the Boston crowd does not have a very high level of singing competence).