Grand melodramas, in the classic sense

Marriage between word and music has never been simple, and is seldom stress-free. Take melodrama. I’m not sure what caused its meaning to change over the years. In the 18th century, melodrama was the genre of spoken word accompanied by — and elevated by — music. Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and Richard Strauss were melodramatists. Now Oxford English Dictionary defines melodrama as “a crude appeal to the emotions.”

But call it what you will, the genre in its original sense has never lost its effectiveness or appeal, as Aaron Copland’s lasting “Lincoln Portrait,” with its stirring orchestral score joined to Honest Abe’s magnificent words, attests. Meanwhile, several new CDs reveal that composers continue to be fascinated by the complex relationship between spoken word and music. In song, lyrics inevitably become subservient to music. But melodrama allows for more nuance in the role-playing between dominants and submissives, and what could be more modern than that?

Like song, melodramas also live and die on their music, but in the latter case, music cannot save poor words. Nor will its music forgive objectionable words. It can even harm a noble text.

That nearly happens in Peter Boyer’s “The Dream Lives On: A Portrait of the Kennedy Brothers,” which was given a high-profile premiere by the Boston Pops earlier this year and is now available as a CD or download through the Boston Symphony website (www.bso.org). A composer who writes in a Hollywood style takes lines from JFK, Bobby and Ted, and blows them up with saccharine emotion. The Pops performance, conducted by Keith Lockhart and featuring Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris and Cherry Jones as the readers, has the feel of a movie trailer shamelessly trying to sell you something. Once inspiring lines become cringe-worthy.

But in Terry Riley’s “Autodreamographical Tales,” on the Tzadik label, the dream really does live on. Riley recounts his dreams of witnessing holy miracles, having his music played by a legendary Italian maestro no one has ever heard of, bumping into strange characters in India. He reads in a sweet voice and sometimes breaks into wordless song, all the while accompanying himself on the piano through a dazzling number of musical styles.

“The Hook Lecture,” which Riley delivered at a music festival in Australia, is also on the disc. This concerns the inner life of the fish and its mystical place on the food chain. The fisherman’s hook catches it; the composer’s musical hook empowers it. The fish feeds us gladly and we give it thanks. When Riley speaks and plays, the two impulses seem singular. Voice and piano, word and music, fish and man, all here become interrelated dualities. This is something very special.

Olga Neuwirth, an Austrian composer with a remarkable penchant for finding the most disturbing pockets in any psyche, calls “Who Am I?” and “No More” audio films, and they can be found on NEOS Jazz. Restlessly experimental and psychologically questing, Neuwirth has worked extensively with spoken word, especially in her darkly “melodramatic” collaborations with the controversial Austrian Nobel Prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek.

Neuwirth created these recent assemblages for the ICI Ensemble, an avant jazz band in Munich, Germany, and she joins in on laptop and a contraption that connects a bicycle wheel to a loudspeaker. Her texts derive from Kafka’s “Letter to his Father,” her own writings and the odd Frank Zappa lyric. The jazz band is edgy, angry, weird. Its musical style changes every few seconds from harsh to moody and back. Words (“darker and darker ... am I paranoid?”) cut through like shards, amazing aural Rorschachs for each listener.

Scott Johnson is a post-Minimalist composer and electric guitarist who has created groundbreaking works with sampled speech. His sources have included Patty Hearst and the late political writer I.F. Stone. In “Americans,” which has come out on Tzadik, he turns to the voices of American immigrants. “Americans all look the same to me,” one says, Johnson’s score bouncing the words back and forth rhythmically and contrapuntally against a backdrop in which the lines become grooves and enter a listener’s consciousness in sly and alluring ways.

In the 1970s, Charles Dodge and John Cage were more extreme and literary with their application of spoken text. A pioneer of computer music and synthesized speech, Dodge made a realization of Samuel Beckett’s radio play “Cascando.” This fascinating experiment has held up. Long hard to find, it has finally been rereleased on New World Records.

Beckett deceptively dehumanized three characters: Opener, Voice and Music. Voice is a stutterer attempting a story. Opener and Music somewhat assist. Surprisingly, Dodge’s warm synthesized speech and music have the effect of humanizing a machine.

Spoken word was part of Cage’s compositional arsenal practically from the beginning. He first came to national attention through a percussion score written to accompany a radio play by poet Kenneth Patchen and broadcast nationwide over CBS in 1942. Thirty years later, Cage turned to deconstructing Thoreau’s “Journal,” and he eventually wound up with a work that begins with phrases and ends (10 hours later!) with syllables, then phonemes and silences. During Cage’s all-night recitations, the final few sounds and many silences met the dawn.

In 1991, Cage recorded 30 minutes worth of the numinous final bits and the pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, with Cage’s blessing, combined that recording with excerpts from Cage’s earlier Music for Piano. The collision has only now been released by Mode as part of its invaluable ongoing Complete John Cage Edition.

Word and music here become indistinguishable, just as Thoreau wanted his body and soul joined to his environment in the Walden woods. Text loses its textness but not its source. The most extreme form of melodrama, “Empty Words” requires the listener to fill in meaning, which makes it precisely the opposite of a crude appeal to the emotions.

mark.swed@latimes.com