Tom Waits and WCWilliams - Sound and Syntax

Folks, if anyone's actually out there, I've got a question. Now, I have a lousy ear for pitch, and even if I didn't, I'd be hard put to chart the shifts in meaning Tom Waits puts into a song by hedging, pronouncing, and omitting words in iterative sequence. But I was listening to "Cold Water" in Mule Variations the other day, and I realized that something in his music signalled to me that he was about to move from present-tense literal description to philosophizing or reflecting or summarizing from memory or perhaps into sentences that operate as modification at a paragraph level.

Even after patching in the words that fill out Waits' measured omissions, I find nothing in the usual pattern of predication and modification that accounts for my foreknowledge. Neither do any clues exist in the parallelisms between stanzas.

Having gone over this about 30 times, all I hear is a change in the pitch pattern, a change of some sort in the guitar cords, and that he blows through what had previously been an end-stopped line, much in the manner that might be indicated by a caesura.

Here's an ad hoc transcription of the stanzas in question:

Cold Water

Well, I woke up this morning with the cold water
with the cold water
with the cold water --

woke up this morning with the cold water
with the cold water
with the cold.


Well the police at the station and they don't look friendly
well they don't look friendly
well they don't look friendly

the police at the station and they don't look friendly
Well they don't look friendly
Well they don't.

/the shift's here/

That [aint no?] cripple shove all door I'm reading in the bible by a '49[?] ford
What price freedom? Dirt is my rug
Well I sleep like a baby with the snakes and the bugs
Well the doors are open but I aint' got no money
I aint' got no money
I aint' got no money
well I aint

I once spent a long time with William Carlos Williams' "Wheelbarrow," from Spring and All, listening to Williams' reading over and over. Ginsberg always said that Williams read like plain speech, which was naturally enough what struck him, and probably the way WCW would have described himself, but if so, speech isn't any plainer than song. Williams organized his lines in two quite distinct and distinguishable ways. He paused, but not at the linestops; at the stanza ends. However, the linestops were clearly denoted by shifts in pitch. His speech was reserved and normal sounding enough, but not a note was neutral.

Apparently, part of what constitutes normal speech is a composition of pitch, stress, and tempo shifts.

We have changes in pitch and stress from syllable to syllable, as litfolks in English know from counting stresses mechanically when we heard about iambs. To leave stress aside for the moment, apparently pitch changes happen between individual notes-syllables and then between phrases at various hierarchical levels of segmentation.

If one imagines a sentence laid out with the diagrams like Chomsky uses inSyntactic Structures, the changes should relate meaningfully.

But I've never seen it done.