I Hope You Know I Am in Your Melody

Every bit a college music professor, I am asked from time to time past students what I think of this or that pop song or songwriter. Lyrics aside, I like to think that I tin speak with some authority on the music itself, having a masters and doctorate in music composition. At ane point I decided that I would sit downwardly and practice some careful listening to current pinnacle-twoscore songs and write brief critiques of them. I did this over a period of several years. One thing struck me continually and almost without exception; I felt similar the old lady in the 1980s hamburger commercial who would exclaim, "Where's the beef?"

Except that I would exclaim, "Where'southward the melody?" Over and over . . .

Mayhap I should clarify that when I say "tune," I mean a tuneful melody—the kind that pop songs used to have in abundance. In fact, this used to be the authentication of the popular song. I am speaking nearly the sort of melody that has a winsomeness to it, even a portability. Such a melody is one that is so appealing that people want to "behave it with them," sing, hum, even whistle it while they are driving to piece of work, doing the dishes, folding laundry, etc.

Indeed, such a tune is generally something that the non-professional can sing unaccompanied. Fifty-fifty though at that place may be recordings of such a song by professional singers with very elaborate instrumental accompaniments, this is not the only way that it can exist performed. The melody makes sense past itself. A tuneful melody is going to have a shape, a waxing and waning, a ascent and fall of the pitches, a focal point or 2, and a long-term forward motion from note to note to note to its logical conclusion. A skillful melody has, as Aaron Copland in one case famously wrote, an "inevitability." This logical shape is what makes information technology beautiful and, therefore, desirable.

It is my determination that afterwards almost 1970, such melodies went into rapid turn down; after about 1980, they almost ceased to be. Why did this happen and what, if anything, does this say virtually modern society and cultural mores? Is there a connectedness betwixt music and the way people live, between the way artists live and the sort of music they create? These connections betwixt art, artist, morality, and society are things that philosophers have mused upon at some length, so let us briefly explore them before we return to our specific topic of popular song melodies.

Get-go, at that place is one thing that nosotros need to get out of the way.

From time to fourth dimension I hear from fellow cultural conservatives, no dubiousness over-interpreting Plato, that a man of bad graphic symbol cannot aid just create music or art that reflects the disorder in his soul. As well, a man of practiced character will necessarily create music or art that reflects his ordered soul. I call this "advertising hominem music criticism." Information technology is a very unsafe arroyo. While this view tin can terminate up being correct in particular cases, without proper nuance and formulation, it is overly simplistic. It can lead to absurd conclusions that do non correspond to reality.

As is often the instance, much light can be shed on hard questions past turning to that great medieval philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas—specially the distinction he made betwixt Art and Prudence. Both involve the perfection of the Practical Intellect. However, different Prudence, which has as its end the good of human being (i.e. morality), Art has every bit its finish the skillful of the work itself. As the twentieth-century expositor of St. Thomas, Jacques Maritain, wrote, "if a craftsman contrives a good piece of woodwork or jewelry, the fact of his being spiteful or debauched is immaterial, merely as it is immaterial for a geometer to be a jealous or wicked human being, if his demonstrations provide usa with geometrical truth."¹

To expand upon this, ane could say that in order to produce a great work of fine art, one has to possess three things: 1) a developed talent; two) the want to produce a cute fine art piece of work—even if only to delight one's patron or the public; and 3) the tools, materials, and forms that his civilization has given him with which he can properly express such beauty. Thus a skilled creative person who wants to paint a beautiful picture of his electric current mistress, and who lives in a culture that has a tradition of beautiful art, will almost likely succeed. The fact of the profound moral ugliness of his unfaithfulness to his married woman will probably non impede his ability to paint a cute portrait if this is what he wants to do.

Withal—and this is central—sometimes, for a number of reasons, specific artistic techniques fail to be transmitted so that artists can no longer express sure feelings and ideals fifty-fifty if they desire to do so. Thus, such a culture tin can no longer even be hypocritical. For case, the people in such a gild might less and less desire to feel dear, laurels, and tenderness, even every bit ethics to strive subsequently, since they are no longer represented in their art and music. (And, consequently, artists will exist even less motivated to preserve the techniques by which these things are expressed.) At the very least, you can tell what a society idealizes in general by studying its music, and I have long thought that a music theorist can be an effective diagnostician of a culture'south soul.

This is still rather abstruse; and so, let me make it more physical by taking the reader on a brief bout of American popular song. Essentially, American pop music begins with Stephen Foster in the mid-nineteenth century. Many of his songs are mistaken for folk songs, fifty-fifty though Stephen Foster was a paid professional who wrote his songs for professional performers who sang them in minstrel shows. While most of his songs have the purity and simplicity of folk-vocal melodies, his "Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair"—for example—approaches the level of a Schubert art song, betraying Foster's training at the hands of the German-born music teacher Henry Kleber.

Subsequently Stephen Foster, at that place is a long fallow flow that spans the turn of the century, during which vaudeville and Tin can Pan Alley produce many piddling, forgettable songs. Fifty-fifty the memorable ones, such equally "Sidewalks of New York," have a quality of sentimentality that date them.

Four measures of a vocal by Cole Porter on a greeting card in his ain paw.

In the mid-1920s, we have the beginnings of what is after termed the era of the Smashing American Songbook. Some contend that this era ends about 1950, others say about 1960. These songs are mini-classics and transcend their era. Almost all of the major songwriters of this fourth dimension, such as Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers, and Cole Porter had classical musical preparation. I like to bespeak out that Cole Porter, a very "naughty" man, even aside from his sometimes suggestive lyrics, still studied harmony and counterpoint under Pietro Yon, a human who went on to go main organist and choirmaster at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. This is probably one of the terminal times that a traditional church musician and a popular songwriter drank together from the well of classical musical culture.

Of grade, not all songs equanimous during this era actually belong to the Great American Vocal Book. At that place were many inferior composers who had short-lived hits. Many of these songs were boilerplate; quite a few were sentimental and corny. Going into the 1950s there is the phenomenon of the "novelty vocal," of which Patti Page's 1953 hit "The Doggie in the Window" is probably the all-time-known instance. However, as terrible as it was, it was a singable melody that could stand on its own two (albeit, corny) anxiety. During this time there is also the emergence of two important movements: Rock and Roll and the American folk-music revival.

These ii movements continue into the 1960s and much has been written about them elsewhere. Many have noted John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who had a song-writing talent that put them across many of their rock song–writing colleagues. However, as talented as they were, they often get classified with what is sometimes called the "Kiddie Pop" of the era. The "Adult Pop" of the 1960s, represented by such songwriters as the Bossa Nova composer Antônio Carlos Jobim and the American Burt Bacharach, produced tuneful and harmonically sophisticated pop songs. Jobim had been influenced by Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and the Brazilian classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos; Bacharach had a Bachelor of Music degree and had studied limerick with the twentieth-century classical composers Henry Cowell and Darius Milhaud.

So, by the finish of the decade there was reason for hope that the 1970s might go reasonably well. Fifty-fifty if the Great American Songbook era was formally over, the Great American Melody continued to be written. While it was non only Americans who composed these melodies, however, American audiences still seemed to enjoy a beautifully written melody—at to the lowest degree as a part of their "listening diet." Something different, notwithstanding, happens during the 1970s. In 1970, the number-one and number-two popular hitting songs were "Bridge over Troubled Water" and "Close to You"—two well-shaped, tuneful melodies. By the end of the decade, in 1979, the elevation two popular hits were "My Sharona" and "Bad Girls"—both rather profane dance numbers. To be off-white, these songs work in their own way considering of their focus on an energetic rhythmic accessory and a potent beat out that made them bonny to dancers. Melody, however, is a secondary element in these songs. Indeed, in "My Sharona" the melody seems to serve equally a mere accessory to the driving accompanimental rhythm, which takes eye stage.

This situation continues through the 1980s and beyond. Fifty-fifty though disco may accept died, the accent on dance music continues as almost popular hits have strong danceable rhythms, just very few have tuneful melodies that tin can stand on their ain. The late George Michael's 1984 hit "Wake Me Upward Earlier You lot Go-Go" is a fairly typical example: a song with an attractive, bouncy rhythm, the whole focus of which is a four-mensurate melodic "claw"² which is repeated endlessly throughout the song. Not a dance tune, merely surprisingly similar in its bones technique, is the 1997 hit ballad "My Heart Will Get On" from the movie Titanic. It has an even weaker verse melody, essentially a teetering back and along between two principal notes, until it gets to the short bombastic refrain which, repeated advertisement infinitum, is meant to catch you lot by the collar with its emotional bid—before sinking back into mediocrity.

Ironically, at this time the influence of Broadway, long a source of tastefully written, tuneful ballads, begins to dry up—but for very different reasons. Beginning in the late 1960s, Broadway composers seemed to want to get more than sophisticated. Even if they used popular styles, many of these composers started to conceive of their musicals as mini-Wagnerian music dramas, with every single line of text set to seamlessly composed music out of which few, if whatever, tunes could be extracted. The "striking-tune approach" of Broadway'southward recent past began to seem very déclassé to them. In fact, the long-reigning doyen of Broadway composers, Stephen Sondheim, has produced few actual songs over his long career—the gorgeous carol "Send in the Clowns" beingness, perhaps, his most notable exception.

What I marvel at these days is the seeming inability of many pop songwriters to write even an eight-measure phrase—probably the most basic phrase length in music. To take Adele as an instance, most of her songs consist of the stitching together of 4-measure units fabricated up of one melodic thought, repeated over and over. To be fair, this is part of her technique to create a kind of a hypnotic event, and she is non lonely in this. I call it the "four-chord mysticism," because, normally, each 4-measure out unit consists of 4 chords, repeated over and over like a mantra. (Although, sometimes I wonder if she actually could write a traditional carol if she ever had the want to practice and so.)

Pop singer-songwriter Adele in concert.

At whatsoever rate, attempt singing her "Rolling in the Deep" without the recording; y'all would probable start getting bored by the third iteration of that opening 4-measure motive. The reason her operation of it works is that, through the add-on at strategic points of instruments, back-up singers, and variations in her voice, a sense of build and forrard motility is created. Ofttimes she later on introduces a contrasting, repeated melodic motive, but the bespeak is that the melody itself does not have much of a shape and sense of forrad motion. It is the professional arrangement that creates this.

Finally, allow us speak of the phenomenon of rap. Similar it or detest it, raps are not songs, properly speaking, because there is no melody. Rap involves the rhythmicized speaking of words confronting a strong, steady trounce. Indeed, there is ordinarily a 4-measure, repeated musical accompaniment in the background, although I would fence that this is not constitutive of the genre. Putting aside rap's often morally noxious lyrics, I would brand one basic observation: information technology should not be surprising that a culture, with an already-weak sense of melody, would elevate to such a high level, within its pop musical civilization, a genre totally bereft of melody.

With rap, we may have finally bottomed out.

Before I conclude, I should stress that I am not promoting whatsoever particular style or era when I speak of the well-crafted, tuneful melody. My ecumenical canon would include such songs as "Beautiful Dreamer," "Blue Skies," "All the Things You Are," "Stella past Starlight," "But Beautiful," "Somewhere," "The Audio of Silence," "Yesterday," "Windmills of Your Mind," "Bridge Over Troubled H2o," "Killing Me Softly with His Song," and "Just the Way You Are." These are only a few examples of songs that you tin both relish your favorite creative person singing and sing on your own, considering these songs make sense every bit pure melodies.

And so, what does information technology all mean—this clear loss of tune in today's popular song? I almost don't want to respond the question, just just let the profundity of this accurately diagnosed symptom sink in. I am more a musical technician than annihilation else, simply information technology is clear to me that the loss of the lyricism of the well-written ballad, and the man values that it represents, is itself a major travesty. How could it be otherwise?

What I also see is the loss of almost any connexion between the wisdom of the classical art music of Western Civilisation and modern popular music—something that was not the case fifty-fifty a generation agone. There was a time when pop-song composers such as George Gershwin and Duke Ellington looked to the long forms of classical music as a means of liberation from the thirty-two-bar song form then prevalent in the popular music of their day. I can only imagine their dismay if either were alive today to see how some popular musicians accept freed themselves from the tyranny of the thirty-ii-bar song past creating . . . the four-bar song!³

Simply this loss of long-term musical thought is also connected to the fact that few ordinary people participate meaningfully in music anymore. In the past a person of average musical power could both enjoy listening to Nat King Cole sing "Mona Lisa," and enjoy singing the melody on his own; fewer people today would desire to sing one of Ariana Grande's latest hits unaccompanied. Even if i enjoys her oeuvre, there is really not much melodic pleasure to be had from her music because, whatever else tin be said about her, her tunes take little shape.

Popular music is now a kind of voodoo that is expert on a very distracted, mute populace. People don't mind closely and are, instead, subliminally induced to experience a limited number of musical emotions: the feeling of being hip, urban, gritty, sexy, funky, soulful—maybe even a short-lived elation—before they motility on to other distractions. Only a few substitutions are allowed. For example, if you lot want to substitute "country" for "urban," a banjo and a few twangs will be thrown in, but the music will be surprisingly like. You volition nigh certainly experience neither true musical lyricism, nor well-crafted, musically intelligent, beauty. Besides, you will definitely non be given a well-shaped tune that you can take home with you lot and sing on your own. The superstar performer about always has to be a part of the package.

The sad thing is, as far as I can see, too many people are content with this state of affairs.

ENDNOTES

1. See Jacques Maritain, The Responsibleness of the Creative person (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960), 23.
2. A "hook" is a curt melodic passage in pop music meant to catch the listener's attention in a conspicuous way. It is to music what a ruby-red clothes is to women'due south way.
3. A measure (or "bar"), which is a group of a specific number of beats of music, is the standard manner in which vocal length is calculated. Since the 1920s, the typical pop song has had a musical length of thirty-ii measures. This thirty-two-measure musical unit is then repeated several times with dissimilar lyrics each fourth dimension. To become an idea of the newer four-bar "McSong" approach, listen to Adele's "Hometown Glory" or Mumford and Sons' "Dust Basin Trip the light fantastic" – to requite just two examples of a common plenty phenomenon.

coxcaunces.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.getprinciples.com/a-people-without-melody/

Share this post