Melody and Memory
with PETER DALE
<< How modern is the modern listener?
One of the critical fingers so often pointed at 20th century music is
that it is not tuneful, or not as tuneful as the music of the past. Yet
one of the most frequent and most withering criticisms of a piece of new
music is to remark that it has some pretty tunes. There is indeed a sense
in which lines are drawn depending on how you view melody. Audiences, on
the whole, want it; critics tend to mock it. Some composers seem actually
to avoid it.
I've just heard Jonathan Dove's new opera Tobias and the Angel.
It's drawn a good deal of critical attention and most of that has been approving
(or better), but one critic complained that the music seemed always to be
on the point of breaking out into a big tune, but either Dove couldn't manage
it or he stopped it in its tracks. Broadly speaking, I think the observation
was true (though at what point observation becomes criticism I'm not quite
A second example:
Recently I took some students of mine to a composing workshop. (It was
generally awful in fact, but that's another matter). The students were encouraged
to produce sounds, any sounds, and they readily obliged. Then, entirely
randomly and accidentally, some of these sounds were juxtaposed with or
superimposed upon others. Most of the results sounded like what they were:
accidents. Occasionally, however, some sequence seemed to make sense somehow,
or some chord seemed worth dwelling on because it was more than just strange;
it seemed to presage something of sense, even something of beauty. Whenever
that happened - as in the nature of accidents, it will from time to time
- the leader of the course would snort: 'Oh, very Cheltenham Ladies Choir.
Try again, please!'
Everyone has noticed that towards the end of our century there is more
music everywhere - in the car, in the shops, in the restaurant, while you
wait on the phone - and all of it is tuneful enough, but we loathe it nonetheless.
It is our century that has coined the word 'jingle' - something meretricious
and trashy, and tuneful. It's as if it rhymes with the clinking of
coins and the jangling of the cash registers whose maw it is designed to
fill. Some of the criticism of melody in serious music is just academic
snobbery and it derives from only a small camp of self-promoting mandarins,
but the general dislike of muzak is widespread. It is perhaps a sad reflection
upon us late-comers that one of the trajectories of music history sees it
moving from the status of precious Orphic mystery to social pollutant.
On the other hand, while there is more - much, much more - music around
and about us, there is less and less music inside us. When did you last
hear a postman whistle or a bus-driver sing? When did you last hear a mother
or father sing to their child? When did you last hum to yourself as you
went about your life?
Obviously enough, the music outside us has replaced the music within
us. There's not much doubt (and suprisingly little regret) about that, but
there is a crucial difference between the two that generally goes unnoticed:
the music from within us is ours, the music from without is not. What people
- perhaps without realising it - are really complaining about when they
inveigh against wall-to-wall muzak is not so much that it's bland, or even
that it's intrusive. They are really registering dispossession.
Copyright © Peter Dale, August
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