Denis Fodor wrote:

>The problem, I think, is that everyone's a musician, though a natural
>rather than a trained one--while not everybody, by a long shot, is a
>God-given philosopher or cosmologist.  Everybody _knows_ what melody is;
>it's only the professionals who know they don't know.  Seems to me, then,
>that when it comes to the problem of melody, Jedermann knows more than
>Superman.  If you want to fix that, the right sort of writer to look for
>is one who can enthrall the supermen into not thinking negatively.

The problem is that the average man thinks he knows what melody is,
because a great number of highly trained people ahve spent a long time
making melody clear to them.  But as history shows time and again - finding
the melody in a new style of work is much harder - even highly trained
musicians could not find it in Wagner's music when it was wet ink, Berlioz'
music was supposed to be devoid of it, and Beethoven was a "poor melodist".

The truth is that while many people have a *sense* of what is melodic, that
does not translate into practical knowledge of the properties of melody, or
how it comes into being.  Any more than an interior decorator with a good
flair for colour could state which wavelengths of light cause these colours
to be.  Instead I have read a half dozen different postulated "you must
include this in a definition of melody because I believe in it!"

The only way the subject of the underpinnings of music can be pursued is
absent the various stylistic agendas that people have, since, observably,
dozens of styles of valid music in dozens of cultures have sprung out of
them.  Some of them make choices which are similar, but by no means all
of them.

Stirling S Newberry
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