Leslie Kinton wrote:



>Allan Gotthelf wrote:

>

>>It's also (pretty) clear that a single melody is a temporal sequence of

>>notes that expresses a single musical thought or idea.  It's not however

>>clear what exactly constitutes a single musical idea in that sense.

>

>I think you're on the right track here.  The problem comes when you try to

>define "single musical idea." In the same way that a sentence can have more

>than one phrase and/or clause, each of which expresses a different thought,

>yet all of which are integrated into a single idea, so, too, a melody can

>consist of many motifs, each expressing a different musical thought, yet

>all of which are integrated into a single musical unit called a melody,

>tune, or whatever.  Past that, it is very difficult to pursue this in

>non-technical language except by further analogy with something like

>language.



Leslie's analogy with the particles of language is not only on the money,

but goes to the core of this central musical issue.  Indeed, music does

more than mimic the immanent characteristics of rhetoric and speech

rhythms; it assimilates their properties as they migrate into and collapse

onto a text.  Leslie's evocation of sentence structure as a way of defining

a melody or phrase is, of course, an ideal way of giving voice to a complex

idea.  But beyond its form, there's another concept that's no less

important to acknowledge, and that is the idea of the CONTRAPUNTAL MELODY.

What this refers to is the essential texture and disposition of what at

first glance seems to be a single, unbroken melodic figure, whatever its

formal structure.  A "melody" may in fact imply (and almost always does in

the elaborately harmonized constructs of the western classical canon,) more

than one voice; as its pitch material dovetails in and out of itself,

alighting upon different registers, the harmonic implications become as

various as wines in season.  Sometimes a composer provides explicit clues:

the actual metrical value of the notes themselve, theri beaming, tenuto

marks, pedal points and even dynamic indications all allow an interpretert

to "walk around":  its contours (as Scriabin once said about his chord of

the Pleroma).  Even in the days that preceded the periodic phrasing of the

classical era, the busy, highly charged melisma of J.S.  Bach, for example

is a land mine of such duplicitous melodic activity.  In virtually every

one of his works, be they keyboard compositions or Passions, this kind of

multi-voiced melisma is the rule.  Sometimes a line will orbit around a

recurring pedal point - that is, a single pitch that serves, in effect, as

a center of gravity but which forms a kind of autonomous drone in its own

right - that is juxtaposed with another line that proceeds in stepwise or

even arpegiatted motion that discreetly peppers and shapes that very line.

Witness the allemande of the Fifth French Suite; an interpreter who fails

to distinguish the functions of the pitch particles that constitute what at

first appears to be a simple horizontal lined only compromises the richesse

of its texture.  And again, sometimes, a specific articulartory cell, built

into the texture of a line, in fact implies something quite different, and

separate; the first variation of the Goldbergs, for example, where from the

very outset the ascending and descending scales are punctuated by a lively,

3 note motivic unit (two sixteenths followed by an eighth) is a case in

point.  Whenever this polonaise like figurerears its head, it surrenders

itself as something of a highlight, as a kind of rhythmic anchor around

which all else moves.  It is a figure that at once belongs to the scales

that lead up to and move away from it, and does not.  You might think of it

- and going back again to Leslie's sentence structure analogy - as a kind

of intimate conversation:.  But the subject matter of the conversation, in

this case, while common to those speaking, nevertheless emerges from the

mouth of individual speakers, some of whom may be speaking from another

part of the room...Now imagine how much more complex this issue become in

the music of say, Scriabin, who managed to give profile simultaneously to

a half dozen or more melismatic strands simultaneously within the context

of a single melodic line.



>There is also another problem in that many classical works (in particular)

>often do not use melodies as such (especially with Beethoven), but rather,

>the large-scale structures are built up from motifs, which are perhaps

>analogous to "phrases" and "subordinate clauses" in language (vs.

>independent clauses, which would be closer to an actual melody, in that

>they have a "stand-alone" status).  And before the flames start, I'm *not*

>saying Beethoven didn't use, or didn't know how to write, melodies!  He

>did, and sure as heck could.



Absolutely.  I might voice support of Leslie's perfect description here

by adding the word "cumulative"; indeed, that was Beethoven's magic -

his ability to cumulatively build larger structures from apparently

abstract fragments that by themselves may simply seem bizarre.  And

this is precisely why his music is so "modern" and so clearly adumbrates

Schoenberg, Shostakovich and even Webern.  It may be that those who have

a hard time listening to dodecaphonic or twelve tone works, at least

masterpieces of the genre, are too anxious to find "melodies" in some

conventional sense, where such are governed principally by tertiary harmony

and proceed, with the unaffected simplicity of a folk tune (although even

folk tunes can be implicitly richer contrapuntally than some are willing to

give them credit for!) from point A to point B.  What's at play here is

rhythm, or to put it more succinctly,.  the presentation, manipulation and

development of articulated rhythmic cells.  These imaginative systoles are

no less riveting, pleasing or disturbing to the ear than the conventional

expectations that even the simplest, most ordinary tune - itself a

convention of functional harmony - sets up in the listener.



>...  One of the great difficulties we have as teachers is getting

>students to vary their approach to the creation of line, depending on style

>and period.  More often than not, advanced piano students have a tendency

>to play a classical line as if it is one long phrase, and as a result, the

>motivic richness is lost in performance.  One reason for this, of course,

>is that the core of our repertoire is romantic, and playing Mozart,

>Beethoven, Haydn, and Schubert(!) demands a different approach than most

>of us were trained in, at least initially.



That is certainly the case.  In both the baroque and classical eras,

phrasing proceeded at a rather different rate, if you will, than it did a

century ater.  And as Leslie points out, to subject the periodic phrasing

of a Mozart or early Beethoven sonata in the same way you would the

Rachmaninoff second sonata only serves to attenuate its form and disrupt

its structural integrity.  Indeed, in the music of that era the internecine

activities of the small phrase units mattered most; again, it is the

cumulative power of motivic material that the interpreter must pay close

attention to.  Now, by no means does that imply that a player should ignore

the same in works of the so-called romantic era; on the contrary, Chopin

and Schumann pay homage at every turn to the tremendous debt they owed to

their classical era predecessors.  Schumann, for example, was nothing if

not a closet baroque composer, appropriating its forms and constructs at

every available opportunity, as he does, for example in the Symphonic

Variations, in the Kreisleriana (where more than one French Overture comes

into play, and by the way, just take a close look at the first movement of

that august work for an example of the contrapuntal melody) and in he

Humoresque, where he takes the idea to an extreme, introducing voices that

don't really exist, writing them in to the score with a footnote to the

player that they are only to be imagined, and not actually played!) Chopin,

of course, idolized Mozart, and it's no accident that his cultivation of a

bel canto for the piano owes as much to Bellini as it does to the operas of

Mozart (tragic and buffa) I'm not sure if i would say, as Alan discenrs,

that melodic lines got longer, per se - though they did in a practical

sense - as much as the manner of articulation within a somerwhat more

rigid, concise framework of phrasing changed.  So Leslie is again dead

right when he says that motivic richness is lost when students (and some

very famous professionals, too!) gloss over the pristine detail of the

smaller sense units in favor of making some ersatz large statement that, as

a matter of form and content, was neither intended or even implicitly

composed.



>I don't think the same thing applies to Bach, whose lines tend to be

>"spun-out" (to invoke the most popular buzz-word, guaranteed to produce

>an "A" on a music history exam:-)



Here I disagree, and certainly throw my hat in with contemporary early

music scholarhip, which likewise dismisses, on the groudns of historic

evidence and compositional anaylsis, such an interpretation...  Even a

cursory study of baroque ornamentation, gesture and phrase structure -

not only in music, but in architecture and design - makes it abundantly

clear the function and value of the small motivic unit and the role of

characterization..  By no means is a baroque melody something that is

simply "spun out" like the bel canto constructs of say, Norma or Moses in

Egypt (though even Bellini, just as his admirer Chopin routinely , paid

tribute to the site- specific abundantly detailed motivic systoles that

gave shape to baroque music and a voice to its aesthetics ).  And let's not

forget the nature of the instrumentarium of the time, where dynamics, at

least as we think of them generically today, operated on quite a different

level.  On a harpsichord, and even on the fortepiano, rhythm itself becomes

a major part of the players dynamic vocabulary, though this approach, which

gave life to rhythm by means of deft inflection, was by no means confined

to the keyboard.Even on string insturments, the shorter bows, prominent

bridges and widely spaced strings had more than a superficial effect on

the players approach to inflection, and thus to rhythm.  Some early

music scholars, including Harnoncourt, have dubbed this phenomenon as

"micro-dynamics", that is, the subtle inflections that govern the smallest

motivic units, and the sense of speech and stress inherent in those very

units that it is the interpreter's obligation to discern and deliver.  And

again, I must stress that what seems spun out only SEEMS that way; these

through composed melodies really have nothing in common with jazz in

compositional categories; they are, again, contrapuntal melodies whose

textures are implicitly informed by more than one line, whose pitch

material, even from one note to the next at times, may be ruled by

different harmonies, as Schenker demonstrated so judiciously.  This is a

good deal more complex than a view that would oversimplify things by saying

that Bach has simply codified improvisation;.after all, we're talking about

COMPOSITIONS, here.  While they may suggest something of an improvisatory

character, every note has been carefully thought out, every shape

meticulously planned and summarily dispatched.  Where Glenn Gould, for

example, indeed spins out melodies in Bach, without regard for either their

harmonic implications or even for the indispensable rhythmic demands of the

inegale, for example, a Harnoncourt, a Christie or a Leonhardt delivers the

listener unto the plurality of a text and all it implies, creating an

entire universe of contrasts and chiaroscuro perspectives within the

context of a single line, and thus revealing the essential Semiology of

the text itself.



>Surely Rachmaninoff is not the only great melodist of the 20th century;

>some of the most beautiful melodies ever written are by Stravinsky, Bartok,

>Gershwin, and Prokofieff, to name just four.



And Shoenberg, And Berg.  And Ligeti,.  And Scelsi.  And of course, the

specialty of my household, Scriabin.....And speaking of composers, and on

another matter entirely, I just heard Andre Previn's new opera, A Streetcar

Named Desire - it's really quite wonderful, should anyone care to begin a

thread about it....



>Hope this helps.



It did, enormously.  And I hope that what I have added, together with

Leslie's astute contributions, opens a a few more windows onto that

mysterious figure, the melody.....



John Bell Young