THE MYSTERY OF MELODY
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books). His editorials appear
regularly in frontpagemag.com and
PJ Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials
of an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut
album, Blood
Guitar, is now available, as is his latest
book, Reflections
on Music, Poetry and Politics.
I spend
a lot of time on the deck of my country home studying birds
and listening to their distinctive calls. The jay is a mimetic
impresario, shrieking like a banshee or warbling like a flute;
the cardinal boasts several different registers, including a
wolf-whistle and a truncated siren; the dark-eyed junco’s
trill and chip has little pitch differentiation; nuthatches
squeak; robins cheep; cedar waxwings emit a scrannel falsetto,
a high-pitched shree; downy woodpeckers drum, their
hatchlings sound like lighter clicks; crows and grackles resemble
Tom Waits on steroids; chickadees emit a flat peeping sound,
the eponymous chicka-dee-dee-dee, which is a form of
recognizable communication. Whenever we put out seed, they signal
to each other the availability of grub with an eight-note “dee.”
Quite remarkable, really. But none of them produces melody.
Even
the famed Keatsian nightingale, pouring forth its soul “in
some melodious plot/Of beechen green,” does not really
sing. Tristan thrumming like a nightingale—cum russino,
as the 12th century poet Thomas of Britain described it in his
Tristan—to attract and summon Isolde would scarcely have
worked in reality. It couldn’t have sounded any worse
than Stravinsky’s screechy symphonic poem Le chant
du rossignol (Song of the Nightingale). (Full
disclosure: my original Russian surname, Soloveitchik, means
“nightingale” and was adopted by the Levite Soloveitchik
family to signal its duty as Temple singers.) More to the point,
the term “birdsong” is a misnomer, or merely a metaphorical
designation for ease of reference. A sonogram display, used
in analyzing the structure of bird calls, does not track a melody
but a concatenation of syllables that simulates a few blips
on a hospital monitor.
All
of this got me thinking one day about melody. Although like
everyone else I knew a melody when I heard one, I had no idea
what a melody actually was, that is, what I knew on one level,
I didn’t know on another, a paradox of epistemology. I
decided to consult my dictionaries, if only as a preliminary
step or rudimentary gesture toward comprehension.
The
Santorella Dictionary of Musical Terms defines melody as
“an organized succession of three or more notes.”
This is clearly an unsatisfactory definition since a minimal
sequence of notes, indefinitely repeated, often (though not
always) with little or no pitch variation, does not constitute
what we would normally recognize as a tune. After all, nothing
prevents us from generating an organized sequence of notes which
may strike us as a demonstrable sonic structure but which we
would never hear as a melody. Schoenberg’s atonal or Twelve-Note
compositions, in which all twelve notes of the chromatic scale
have equal weight and importance, does not yield melody but,
as Michael Walsh writes in The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,
“music worked out on paper,” expressing a Marxist
conception of post-Capitalist culture in which all citizens—aka
units—are equal regardless of talent, intelligence and
productivity. This is neither music nor melody; it is politics
of the dreariest sort.
The
Oxford Dictionary of Musical Terms provides a slightly
better description of the phenomenon we call “melody,”
but fails to consider it in its essence, where it comes from
and why it should exist. To say it is “a succession of
notes of varying pitch, with an organized and recognizable shape”
does not get us very far. So are many other audible events that
are not especially or even remotely “melodic.” To
attribute melody to dolphin-speak, as the Oxford does, begs
the question. (Similarly, the theramin-like language of whales
cannot be heard as melody.) To categorize melody as one of the
“fundamental capacities of the human species” is
true, but unhelpful. The issue is how we hear melody as a unique,
modular configuration of sounds which are tangible and yet incorporeal,
as if inhabiting an ethereal region between the neural and the
spectral and eliciting a vast range of sympathetic response.
I’m
not about to dive into the complex universe of musical theory,
the history of musical development and its technical armature,
or even the romantic pathos of tonal impressionism. Of course,
music in the fullest sense—tempo, pitch, timbre, the diverse
scales, texture, 'colour,' counterpoint, their combinations
and temporal relationships—is one of the great mysteries
of human spirit and culture. Its intrinsic components in their
multiple arrangements, however, can be mastered. Here I’m
preoccupied with something no less or even more fundamental,
cryptic, occult, and maybe unfathomable; namely, with the enigma
of melody, that 'something' which cannot be mastered. One thinks,
too, of the ineffable “sweetness” of melody, what
the Greeks called mélos or mélisma—song,
air tune—derived etymologically from méli—honey.
Which brings to mind Aristotle’s maxim in Book VIII of
the Politics, quoting the revered poet and musician
Musaeus: “Song is to mortals of all things the sweetest.”
To
start with, there is plainly no way of knowing how melody originated;
here we must rely on pure, unverifiable speculation. Did certain
sounds in nature—the kettle drum of thunder suggesting
bass notes or avalanches and earthquakes producing eerie ribbons
of sound—implant the notion in the minds of our hominid
ancestors, like Calibans who dreamed “sweet airs that
give delight and hurt not”? Did modulations in speech,
phatics and vocatives eventuate in the reproduction of simple
melodic sequences? Impossible to tell.
Or
was melody—whatever it is—somehow there at the start,
predating actual speech, inherent in the chromosomes, a genetic
gift that can be either latent or manifest, depending on the
individual or the culture? Or, as some may believe, is melody
the hosannas of heaven filtering down to the fallen creature
in his travails, subsequently emerging in the spirit? Is this
how Jubal, as Genesis 4:21 informs us, became “the
father of all such as handle the harp and organ”? One
may recall Milton in Book XI of Paradise Lost, who
seems to refer to theories of speculative music (musica
speculativa) that were in vogue in the 17th century. The
notion is that the music created by man on earth (musica
practica) is an attempt to replicate the music of the spheres.
Equally
mysterious is the process of “inventing” or, better,
“discovering” the elusive strains of a melody, guitar
on one’s lap, pen and notepad on the table, gaze focused
on the far distance. Sometimes a melody seems to resemble a
disembodied soul seeking a body to be born in, as in certain
religious concepts associated with diverse Eastern faiths and
some Western philosophical traditions, like Orphism or NeoPlatonism.
You can sense it on its way to its future home, plangent yet
insistent, a kind of mellifluous urgency that announces itself
as if it were fully formed and needing only to be properly received.
Your job is to let it happen, to offer hospitality. As John
Keats wrote in a letter to John Taylor of February 27, 1818,
“If Poetry comes not as naturally as Leaves to a tree
it had better not come at all.” The same may be true of
melody. In my experience, the melody and lyrics of the song
“Lonely Hotel Room” landed on my guitar within an
hour or two—here
recorded, accompanied by my wife Janice on keyboard and Matt
Baetz on Dobro.
At
other times, the melody needs to be sought, coaxed into existence,
drawn out of its distal reluctance or fey mischievousness. One
knows it’s there, hovering just beyond the horizon of
consciousness, but hardly audible, or even completely inaudible—all
one intuits is an acoustic shadow. There’s nothing one
can do in such cases except hum and strum, without plan, without
conviction, intermittently, for as long as it takes—days
or weeks. I seem to recall poet Wallace Stevens saying in one
of his obiter dicta something to the effect that when
inspiration flags, one had better force the issue rather than
emerge empty-handed from one’s solitude. There is some
truth to this also. Again, from my own practice, the song “Loving
You, Loving Me,” here worked up as a video clip, defeated
my best efforts for weeks. The only reason I kept flailing away
is that I could feel the invisible presence of the melody, tantalizingly
suspended somewhere beyond my reach—before it finally
alighted on the strings. Songwriters and musicians know exactly
what I’m getting at.
Of
course, sometimes accidents happen. One is aimlessly fooling
around on the instrument and suddenly, without warning, a melody
appears out of nowhere, prompted perhaps by a bird call or a
lyric forming itself in one’s mind—or by nothing
at all—which implies that a meaningful series of notes
in some inscrutable way pre-existed its emergence into the material
world even without one’s initial awareness or vague presentiment.
It might also be the result of a cacophony of unrelated sounds—for
example, one is slamming away at the strings or the keyboard
in an access of pure frustration—from which a singable
tune unexpectedly disenjangles itself, like a cellular mutation,
a messed-up gene that leads to something complex and resilient:
as biologists say, “a flaw that is wrong in exactly the
right way.” The mystery only deepens.
By
which I mean not only how a melody comes to be but, as I continue
to wonder, what a melody actually is, in effect, the very ontology
of song. Rhythm is theoretically understandable; a regular or
syncopated beat, meter or the mensural unit of time, kinetic
emphasis, are no doubt based on the heartbeat, the accentuations
of the pulse over which rhythm is superimposed. But melody?
By
“melody,” I intend something other than “music”—which
is a composite phenomenon consisting of combinations of tones
vocal and instrumental, including rhythm, melody and harmony—and
something other than the monophony of early plainsong or Gregorian
chant (of which rap is the decadent, contemporary instantiation,
a form of liturgical vulgarity). It’s obvious, too, that
I hear melody with Western ears, and thus don’t find the
music of many other traditions particularly melodic—Indian
sitar music, for example. Arabic, Turkish and Persian music
is fascinating, dancing maqam quartertones on the oud
(from which the European lute is descended), as in this
piece by Persian virtuoso Yasamin Shah Hosseini.
But for the most part it is not comparatively melodic in the
hummability mode. Arab popular music, on the other hand, frequently
shows the influence of the Western/Latin/Spanish tradition,
as in the 1996 prize-winning song, long one of my favourites,
by Amr Diab, Habibi Ya Nour El Ain (“My love,
You Are the Glow in My Eyes”).
Melody
may have its origin in human nature or in the realm of spirit,
but, as we’ve noted, it is inflected differently in different
cultures. Tonal systems vary dramatically; yet, though all these
systems will qualify as music, not all can be described as melodic.
It may well be that the Western imagination is specifically
attuned to the reception of melody from its undocumentable source—at
any rate, melody in its more elaborate, sophisticated and memorable
aspects. The Bible is replete with references to song; the Greeks
pioneered a plurality of melodic modes—Dorian, Phrygian,
Mixolydian, Lydian, Aeolian, whose intervals were based on mathematical
ratios discovered by Pythagoras, which came to be known as “the
fingerprints of the Gods”; and Church monophony eventually
developed into lavishly harmonic and rhythmic polyphony. I am
tempted to say that melody as it has been heard, cultivated,
refined and transmitted is one of the signatures of Western
civilization, an aural distillate of its essence.
I am
by no means suggesting that other musical traditions are not
valid and authoritative and beautiful in themselves, but I am
proposing that melody per se, in its richest and most
memorable form, was detected—and perfected—by the
Western sensibility. I will surely be accused of ethnocentrism
in advancing such an hypothesis but it seems persuasive to me
and at least worth considering. This is not, however, an argument
I relish plunging into, and it remains at a tangent to my main
thesis.
All
this discussion notwithstanding, I still can’t say what
melody is. I do know that melody is something that can be hummed,
and that I can’t hum plainchant or rap or Ravi Shankar.
Hummability is the basic litmus test of melody. Melody is also
something that is deeply satisfying, affording us an inexplicable
pleasure that is not somatic. It is sensuous but not sensual,
appealing to a dimension of our being that oscillates between
the emotional and the spiritual, which is why it can affect
our mood in profound ways and compel us to echo, duplicate,
replay, rehearse, and listen to it over and over again.
Melody
can be as simple as, say, Paul Anka’s “Diana”
(despite the teenage rubbish of its lyrics) or as hauntingly
original as Pachelbel’s “Canon,” which everybody
knows from dentists’ waiting rooms. Classical pieces in
the form of symphonic or ensemble compositions are certainly
not hummable in their lengthy and intricate, horizontal/vertical
continuities, but we discern themes and melodies, cantilena
passages, that are seductively accessible and that we often
find ourselves driven to reproduce. Baroque music is virtually
threaded with melodic passages both sprightly and melancholy,
a music of paramount hummability. So are country and western,
American musical theater and any number of pop exemplars. The
same applies to opera. We may not speak Italian or German, but
arias from Rigoletto, Manon Lescaut, Die Zauber Flöte
and many others run through our minds on their own sonorous
power. Offenbach’s “Barcarolle” from The
Tales of Hoffmann is enough to drive one crazy with the
need to repeat—in fact, it brings the tears to my eyes.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s light operas are, in my estimation,
works of melodic genius, especially the melodies from the Phantom.
Ditto Gilbert and Sullivan—though in this case the lyrics
in their rhyming cleverness tend to consolidate the melodies.
Melody.
What it is, how it originates, how we recognize and respond
to its auditory contours as something constitutively different
from all other sound patterns, why it seizes on memory and mood—all
questions I cannot answer and mysteries I cannot plumb. The
evolution of speech into myriads of complex forms and structures
is no less mysterious. But speech has a purpose, communication,
messaging; the “engineering design” behind our sentences
serves to ensure comprehension, as Steven Pinker puts it in
The Sense of Style. What purpose does melody have?
Certainly not communication in the pragmatic way we understand
it. Animals clearly possess an embryonic language to signal
danger, objects in the environment and visceral states, but
they do not sing or hum. There is no melody in nature.
The
command Caedmon received from the angel in the Venerable Bede’s
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People is,
as has been variously rendered, “Sing me Creation,”
not lecture or sermonize me. We can surmise that the text would
have been an expression of devotion, the melody a homophonic
replica of the divine creation felt in the depths of the self.
What
can one say? There is an element of the miraculous about melody,
and like a miracle it cannot be explained, only marvelled at.
It has one wanting to sing Creation. It has one believing in
the reality of the numinous.
