I will occasionally, on Look, Stranger!, feature guests posts when something catches my eye and I would like to republish, especially in an arena in which I have a great deal of interest but not much in the way of knowledge. Such as the question of what makes a tune. The novelist Damian Lanigan turns his attention to this intriguing question. I may be in the process of becoming one of the people Damian gently chides below, who greet musical experiment with the catch-all objection that “it has no melody” but I would be hard pressed to say what I meant by that. Not that it would deter my certainty on the issue at all. So here are some thoughts on what is a tune, accompanied by an explanation better than abstract thought can supply in the form of the wonderful music itself.
You can find Damian at weatherglass.substack.com
The Universal Truth of music is this: the stuff you like is the best stuff ever, and the stuff other people like is modern rubbish. Here's Plutarch writing 2000 years ago:
"For of the Platonics the most...have made it their business to compile several treatises concerning the ancient music and the reasons why it came to lose its pristine perfection."
It's been downhill since 975BC. Or 1985 at least. We all know people whose musical taste has not developed since around the time they lost their virginity. Music back then was great, you see, whereas now it's all bloody nonsense. Yesterday's musical avant gardista is, as night follows day, today's gloomy reactionary. Nietsczhe, formerly a Wagner-crazed firebrand, wrote in 1885 “Only sick music makes money today". Today, middle aged men lament that everything's gone down the nick since "Nuthin' But A G Thang", and Instagram is lousy with ex-ravers juxtaposing doing the laundry to a Born Slippy soundtrack to emphasise how far humanity has fallen.
In short, people find it very hard to be objective about music: obviously it can't be true that the greatest music in all human history was written in the two year period around your GCSEs, but plenty of people seem to believe it. I think the phenomenon arises because their own subjective experiences of music were so powerful and so wonderful everything else inevitably feels like a falling off. Nostalgia is a form of depression, an overwhelming awareness of how much has been lost: a belief that OK, Computer is the pinnacle of human musical achievement might well be related to the fact that it came out the year you were full of hope, free of responsibility and as beautiful as you were ever going to get. Everything that was not experienced in this brief, intense Golden Age must be treated with the utmost suspicion. And, looking for some way to support their flimsy reasoning, nostalgiacs usually settle on 'the tunes were better in my day'.
It has always been this way. Nicolas Slonimsky, writes in the introduction to his Lexicon Of Musical Invective (highly recommended: a collection of 200 years of critical hatchet jobs), "Unfamiliar music impresses a prejudiced listener as a chaos of random sounds". And what 'chaos' invariably means is a perceived lack of a tune. Here's the Paris Musical Gazette in 1847: "There has not yet appeared an Italian composer less capable than Verdi of what is commonly known as writing a melody." Eighty years later, Stalinists and the broader musical establishment in Europe joined forces to condemn modern music's supposed attempts to "destroy melody". More recently, a prominent YouTuber has produced the video below which seeks to prove that tunes are over: "This video explores the Death of Melody – a phenomenon observed in pop music, film music, and even classical music Examples range from Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, One Direction, and Billie Eilish, to DJs, Remix culture, James MacMillan, Hans Zimmer, John Williams, and so on!" The video has over 2 million views.
People are worried. Where would we be without tunes?
(There is an additional theme in musical polemics: that 'bad' music is actively immoral and leads to broader social degeneracy. Plato recommended banning the flute on such grounds, and it's a shame we don't have his remarks on Cardi B's WAP. But this is a topic for another piece.)
So What Is A Tune?
It can be many more things than you might think. Arguably, the most famous bit of music in history, the first movement of Beethoven's 5th symphony, has no 'melody' whatsoever. If you pick out the opening theme with one finger on a piano keyboard, it seems like the most unpromising item possible out of which to build several minutes of music. If you didn't know the piece, and someone told you that this several minutes would consist almost entirely of repetitions of said item, then you'd assume that everyone involved had gone nuts. And actually, it is nuts:
How Beethoven turned that unpromising, almost non-existent thing into this astonishing edifice of total coherence, and that offers such inexhaustible fun and fascination is a mystery as great as any of which I'm aware. Beethoven could see more clearly than anyone that music can be built out of small, discreet figures, and that these tiny, apparently unremarkable sequences of notes, if selected well, could be as pregnant with musical meaning as the longest, most flowing aria - if not more so, because by being brief, they offer a greater potential for development. For Beethoven, themes, motives, figures, whatever you want to call these short melodic tags, were the essence of music, however amusical they might seem when reduced to their simplest form. Here's Bernstein talking about this phenomenon in relation to his seventh symphony:
Now, let's take something a bit different, Nicki Minaj's verse from Kanye West's Monster. This was pretty much her debut on record, and what an astounding debut it is. Its brilliance is instantly completely unmistakable, and its hilarious, demonic energy means that the rest of the song is merely its handmaiden. Look at the official video on YouTube: at the moment Minaj comes in, views roughly quadruple:
I can still sing this through, pretty much note-perfect, so surely it can't be anything else but a tune? Many people persist in the belief that rap is somehow non-music because it's 'not melodic'. I could not disagree more with this assertion. What hip hop has in fact done is released a vast untapped source of melodic invention, one that derives from the close intervals and the infinitely subtle rhythms of the spoken word. Eminem's Lose Yourself has a clearly 'melodic' chorus, but the notionally 'unmelodic' verses stick in the mind just as securely. Everybody even half -familiar with the song can render these lines with almost perfect felicity:
Snap back to reality, OHH! there goes gravity
OHH! there goes Rabbit, he choked
He's so mad, but he won't
Give up that easy nope, he won't have it
He knows, his whole back's to these ropes
It don't matter, he's dope
He knows that, but he's broke
He's so sad that he knows
when he goes back to this mobile home, that's when it's
back to the lab again, yo, this whole rap shift
He better go capture this moment and hope it don't pass him
Rap marries words and melody more closely than any form before it, because the words actively, directly create the melody. There's no need to write a melody to match the words or attempt to fit the words to a melody because the two things are functionally identical. I imagine ancient Greek music had a similar nature. The Classics blogger Stanley Burnski writes: “The Greek term [for music] had a wider bearing than the familiar English word. Most Poetry had some musical accompaniment, and lyric poetry was typically sung." The line from Terpander of Antissa to Megan Thee Stallion is somewhat sinuous (it had to travel through three thousand years after all), but is nonetheless unmistakable: words are always just one repetition, one emphasis, one rhythmical variation away from being music. That is, from being melodic.
Some tunes are neither tiny unremarkable fragments, like der-der-der-DUR, nor have entirely verbal origins like rap. These things are what most people mean by the word 'melody'. We all know who the melodists are: Mozart, Schubert, Verdi (sorry Paris Gazette of Music), Gershwin, Porter, McCartney, Carole King and so on. They sound like this:
There are few people who cannot instantly recognise the beauty of this tune. It's helped along by the lovely, painful words, but it's a melody that would make any words sing.
Then listen to this outpouring:
Mozart really disliked both the flute and the harp. Presumably, he felt that the only way to reduce his antipathy was to write the single most delectable piece of music ever written for either instrument - or maybe for any instrument ever. Some crazy, besotted musicologist set out to count the number of tunes that appear in the first movement, and stopped when he got to twenty three. Sorry to fall into the music-moralist's mode here, but if you can't see that this concerto and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow are absolutely, incontrovertibly, *objectively* beautiful, then there's something wrong with you and you need to go to jail and / or the asylum.
The Carole King and the Mozart are about 180 years apart, but the talent of each would be obvious to the other: they have this kinship in melody that marks them out as specially blessed people. Melodies are, amongst other things, a kind of miracle, and the ability to create them is extremely stingily distributed. Throughout history there have been hundreds of millions of musicians and only a handful of them have the melodic gift - if by melodic gift we mean in the old sense of the ability to write a long, sweet line. Rarity is an intrinsic aspect of the value, and why musicians are so much more revered than novelists or painters.
(Back to hip hop for a moment: the reason there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of new rappers who come up with maddeningly catchy hooks and tags is twofold: one, the transformation of speech into melody as described above is as fertile a seam as the English language itself, and two, the producers are paid a lot of money to make sure the instrumental part is structure around the coolest, most original samples and beats. When you have all recorded sound in history and every possible sentence in the language at your musical disposal, lots of interesting stuff is liable to happen.)
So Come On Then, What is a Tune?
I realise I've been avoiding the hardest task - an actual working definition - so here's a stab: a tune is any musical element that is distinctive enough to be memorable. This allows me to cast my net quite widely, but it's hard to think of any good musical phrase that doesn't meet the requirement. In some ways, melody is like a chair: hard to define precisely but very easy to locate in a room. In other ways, a melody is quite unlike a chair: most people could put together some form of seating given an hour or two, whereas only the tiny band of the divinely ordained can write Yesterday, or the second act of Tristan und Isolde.
The key thing is the memorability scale: if you listen to something three times and still can't make head or tail of it, it probably doesn't have a good tune. A corollary of this is that every good tune is singable. Here is a song, performed here with phenomenal sensitivity and loveliness by Ensemble Belladonna, that was written in England around 1250 AD:
The fact that one of the first English songs we know of is a wistful meditation on bad weather / mortality is funny and cute. But it's the tune that speaks to is across the eight centuries: we can sing along with them, we can participate directly in the music, because the sequence of pitches, rhythmically arrayed, repeated in variation, is instantly recognisable to us, secular as its subject is, as a brief and glorious encounter with the divine.
I am aware that I've used variations on the word 'divine' a couple of times in this piece. This makes obvious sense when applied to, say, the opening of Bach's St Matthew Passion or the entirety of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater: both pieces originate in deep religious faith and make human (superhuman) efforts to offer their gifts as musicians to the glory of God. But it might also make sense to use the term of someone like Schubert. Here is the composer and Cambridge professor Robin Holloway taking a long time to get to his point:
"Schubert is at the very heart of music. More: definition of what he is, account of what he did, in music, are tantamount to a description of music itself in its most normative and widely shared sense—what it is, how it works, what it is for. No composer is less dispensable, more essential and intrinsic. ‘Essential’ meaning closest to the art’s grammar, syntax, language, which he employs with extraordinary purity and exactness even while they undergo in his hands the most radical extensions ever made by one individual. Their purpose, of course, to expand, to deepen, intensify expression: to which the same superlative applies—no other single composer has added so largely to what music, in its innate nature, can say...they can’t be separated: the wider key-relationships, the major/minor ambiguity, the enharmonics, the enhanced dissonances, equally with the exploration of the most basic facts of diatonicism, and every motive, melodic, rhythmic, textural element; all this is in such perfect fusion with the affective ends that he has to be called Apollonian."
He got there in the end: yes, professor, say 'Apollonian' if you like, but it's 'god-like' that you mean. Holloway probably would have felt exposed putting such a risky thought at the top of the paragraph, but very many people feel this way about the nerdy, extremely ill-fated Austrian genius. His friends used to have to find spare scraps of paper when they went on their walks, in case he happened to tune into the intellectual ether and came up with another deathless, timeless song (he invariably did). A pianist I know says that playing Schubert is like waking up in heaven. There is no composer who provokes more religious vocabulary. The reason is pretty obvious: the scale and nature of his achievement make no rational sense whatsoever and in such circumstances, an appeal to the metaphysical is inevitable. He wrote this when he was 19:
Yes, God is dead, but that doesn't mean that the divine has gone with him - if by 'divine' you mean something mysterious, powerful, sublime, something to which we turn our faces in awe and gratitude and submit. Something like this:
Plato in his Timmaeus writes that the structure of everything in the universe, at the deepest level, has a fundamentally musical quality to it, and that man, in order to attain his highest form, should seek to partake of this quality. Of course, as history's original fascist, Plato wanted a music that was entirely in service of the state (he felt the flute was too likely to stir up erotic, insurrectionist feelings so proposed a ban). But, consciously or not, I think we share in his insight. Indeed, technology has made it a tangible reality. All music we've ever heard is stored somewhere in our minds. All music ever created by humanity is, thanks to Spotify permanently circulating us. We can enter into this domain for any duration, at any time. This ever-presence is felt to be somehow cheapening, but I think it's up to you to make of it what you will. To me, the knowledge that now and forever I'll be surrounded by a vast silent weather system of music, that I'm always only one second away from entering into the closest thing we have to a spirit realm, is in itself some other form of miracle. And the thing you seek out once you enter said realm, the thing you hunger for, that you can't wait to start? That is a tune.
A terrific piece. Thanks a lot.