Twists and Turns:
the Shape of Tune
or: A Short History of the Squiggle...
A Radio Three "Twenty Minutes" Interval Talk,
broadcast on 23rd July, 2008
Once when I worked in a record shop a chap in an odd mack came in and asked for a piece of music that began: DAHH-DEEEE— ... and I said, “Aha, the prelude to Tannhäuser!”
opening bars of prelude to Tannhäuser [café band arrangement]
Yes, that's the one.
Have you ever asked yourself, why a tune has the shape it does? What factors are at play, so to speak? You can remember how it goes and maybe even spot cross-references along the lines of: “Oh, you know, the slow movement of Mahler Four, it makes me think of the Prisoners’ Chorus in Beethoven's Fidelio!” — that sort of thing... There may in fact be a clever reference going on there, that works on your half-grasping the echo...
No matter, what I mean is just: what makes a Brahms tune a Brahms tune and not a Bach or a Bruckner or a Brubeck tune?
After all, there’s nothing simpler: a tune is a sequence of notes. And that’s that.
Not that every or any old sequence will do.
There are of course what we think of as good tunes and bad tunes, or there are short tunes and long meandering ones, tunes we call mere ditties, tunes we feel we have to call 'melodies' and tunes so intricate, elusive or miniscule some people refer to them as 'the thematic material'... and there are the catchy tunes we find we hum on a walk — sometimes we can’t get them out of our head, either — and there are memorably functional tunes like ‘Colonel Bogey’ where we don’t really care who wrote them, and there are tunes that we’d say are quintessential Bach, Mendelssohn, Brahms, whoever. Even if they didn't happen to be written by Brahms, Mendelssohn or Bach...
Now, if you’re lucky enough to have been taught music, even at school, you’ll’ve been taught with emphasis on the vertical: on the way notes go with each other on top of each other, how chords establish a key — that’s ‘harmony’ — and how the progression of chords through time in a piece of music, the passage through various keys, is ‘structure’.
Oh yes, ‘material’ is introduced and reappears, and ‘new material’ does the same, but the study of music has a tendency to look at the plot more than the characters, as if a piece trundles along unfurling events where we don’t pay too much heed to their content.
But yes, quite: music moves horizontally, through time. And if music responds to any sort of primal human or indeed animal instinct — and that's where the story really starts — it’s song that does it: the instinct to chant, warble or twitter, to weave into the air our sense of life on Earth. In other words, the instinct for melody & rhythm, horizontal instincts far older & deeper in us than Sonata, Fugue or Variation. In Western Music the theory goes that all melody ‘implies’ a harmony but that doesn’t matter much to the nightingale; nor to the neanderthal who hasn’t read his theory textbook but who needs to organise a hunt. Melody without harmony is just fine, thank you; harmony without melody is a fat lot of use...
Of course, by the time we reach someone like Bach, let alone Brahms, we are far from birdsong & the baboons, if not the Babylonians — we have structure & form. Boy, do we have structure. And boy, do we have tunes! Now, as for structure we have Rondo Form, ABACADA and so on, we have Variation Form, AAAAAAA; Sonata Form goes AB—ahem well that one's more complicated; as for Fugue........ So that’s all fine as far as the form bit goes, but what makes a tune a tune? What will do as a tune?
MUSIC: suddenly: opening salvo of op.111
Phew, will that do you? A texture of gesture and fragments and progressions, an energy, a door broken open, — but a tune?
The crucial word there is 'texture'. It's a word I've lifted from the great theorist and pianist Charles Rosen, a clever jiggle where he says Sonata Form for instance is not a form but a texture. And basically what he means is an almost inextricable togetherness of harmony & melody — which goes to explain the notorious freedoms the great(er) composers take with Form, but also the wide discrepancy there is in what will serve muster as a tune...
To give one of the most vivid examples, in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, the defining, so-called 'Tristan chord' and Isolde’s last melody are products of each other, their possibility is interdependent. And so it was for Vivaldi and so it was for Hummel or Schoenberg, Cole Porter, Boulez or Byrd. Such harmonies allow, encourage and ferment such melody and such melody returns the compliment in harmony.
Indeed, this history is the history of western music.
[CLEARS THROAT]
Well, let’s say, it’s the history of notated western music. For we can be fairly sure that the invention of notation induced a change in music. It's not just a case of 'then they wrote it down, jolly good'; no, writing it down meant greater control, which meant greater complexity — but also a more formalised, even restricted complexity. Anarchy had had it, though some feel it may be taking its revenge these days.
Things get going in the ninth century when church music was first notated.
MUSIC: chant
Enter the twiddly bit!
And this is where the story really starts.
Early European notation even suggests microtones, as we heard there, as well as very elaborate ornamentation. This points to an intricacy of musical invention before that, unfettered by notation; its very complexity came to require notation — performers were simply lost without having it all written down for them — but in a way this sewed the seeds of its own destruction, as the level of invention came to be diminished, simplified and simply dullened by the inevitable streamlining and standardisation inherent in the fact of notation.
Clearly, the idea of ornamentation has existed almost as long as the idea of melody; the natural instinct to invent a bit, to exaggerate a bit, to revel or show off a bit, quite apart from the instinct to pretend that the fluffed note you just played was deliberate or to make an expressive device out of the fact you needed a slightly lower note from which to slide up to the tricky high one... all of these instincts existed alongside the way one melody would have been handed down from one player or singer to another, from one generation to another, each needing to set its stamp. Singers especially.
But with notation there is a new formality. There’s your tune and there’s your squiggle.
MUSIC: chant
There you have it: your tune is your tune, thank you, and the squiggle is added — or larded — on. A hierarchy evolves. And thus a sense of correct and incorrect, rather than your way and my way; this tension has increased through history, to create a faultline...
The mere squiggle quickly acquired a range of significance that rivalled that of the ‘proper’ main notes of the tune. It might be individualistic, heroic or sensual, or even structural. It can exploit an echo, for instance, in a great cathedral, in those moments of usually agonising suspense as the music fights with itself and the building to attain purity or even ecstasy... So much so that within early church music there was indeed an endless battle back and forth, since the virtuosity of ornament could be seen as exalting the greater glory of God, spinning curlicues of sublime sound amidst the fantasies of stonework and stained glass of the building, while the sensuality of ornament is easily suspect for being individualist, disrespectful to God, decadent even for being human, all too human.
As we would expect, just as with the to-&-fro history of liturgy and theological tolerance, at times the church tried to impose more prescriptive notation — resulting in predictable standardisation and the demise of ornament. You'd think they had enough on their plate but Among other things the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s found time to threatened to ban any & all ornament in church music; we adore Palestrina for smooth, simple lines, but he was kowtowing to the Cardinals as much as Lloyd Webber plays to the market.
Yet, as ever, such reactionary charm was soon a backwater. Power and wealth were slipping away from the church, to the aristocracy and even, heaven forfend, to the people. The first detonation came with Opera, a new art form invented about four hundred years ago. This is where the story really starts. It was secular, grand, vulgar, opulent and direct; every human emotion was mapped upon humans & gods & unholy mythological characters, and not a single effect of theatre or song was left out. Ornament had a field day.
MUSIC: florid Monteverdi
Whoa! — playing to the crowd! A craze was launched as squigglesome as the craze for ruffs and cuffs in costume. You see, your squiggle came to serve any of a number of different purposes: leaning on a note can help emphasis a harmony or it may help the second trumpet to remember when to come in.
— or show off technique, of course
— or a note might be written as an embellishment simply to avoid technical censure for it being in the wrong place at the wrong time, in terms of the supposedly strict harmony required by the ‘rules’. How subversive can a quaver be?
Mildly proper types like J.S.Bach sought to regain control from the excesses of the performers — first by writing out their own elaborate decorative passages, later by simplifying melody and putting much greater weight on structure — but these gambits served only to honour the enemy within: the ornament, the instinct to warble or twitter, to load upon melody all the melodrama the performer could muster.
Imagine what Bach might have thought of this sly louche moment in Glenn Gould's enchantingly mischievous rendering of the first Gavotte in the 6th English Suite:
MUSIC: Bach: English Suite VI, Gavotte I
You see, ornament could no longer be un-self-conscious and that's where Gould is so witty with his subversive quaver. Ornament spoke for the spirit of the age — nowhere more so than in the French baroque, where, like an echo of Versailles, we find in Couperin almost every note has its ornament. If Bach had sensed a losing battle, Couperin certainly went for "If you can't beat 'em, join them!"
MUSIC: Couperin
Outrageous! — like that moment when Lawrence Stern, in "Tristram Shandy", has to describe a chap's wave of his swagger-stick by putting a squiggly line in his text. As an artist I love that.
Yet listen here, to Haydn, just a generation later, what is he up to?
MUSIC: opening of Sonata 58 in C major (Hob.XVI/48)
That ornament is no baroque embellishment, something adding a swagger to the main thing, it is the main thing. It’s written out in a definite, purposeful manner; and its purpose? — well, it suggests a sort of yearning or striving that characterises this wistfully gritty, bare opening declamation. That suggestion of drawing breath before the great effort, of hunching before releasing, of summoning energies before a leap — this is a lavish dimension the humble turn never had before. Characteristically, Haydn lets you take it seriously while also taking the micky out of the more portentious performance styles his music had to endure. But this hunch or experiment is the start of a whole new chapter: the twiddlesome squiggle is taking on a new dimension...
Ha, but it had only just started its ascent. And this is where the story really starts. Try this variant on the well established fioritura of old:
JB HUMS: “yah, diddle-ah-di-dum” from Tristan
Now you may think that that’s from Wagner's Tristan, and of course it is; but it’s also from Schumann’s Kinderszenen, or even from Beethoven’s Adelaide. This is no longer a common currency of Baroque embellishment, in the Romantic repertoire the pivot-&-twisting figuration has come to suggest a particular sort of terrifying longing, be that the wistfulness of love:
MUSIC: Beethoven: snatch from final movement of "Choral" Symphony
— or a wistfulness for childhood innocence:
MUSIC: Kinderszenen, “Ende vom Lied”
— or, at the fullest final exhaustion of uphill optimism despite the floods against it, this colossal haul that animates so much of Mahler’s last great utterances, Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth, the Tenth...
MUSIC: oboe twiddle from Abschied
Certainly by the time late Mahler leans upon it with all his apprehension and anticipation, our (old friend the) plain old fioritura has come to express love or yearning or defeat all with a level of irony that seems to establish itself as the deepest message of the entire exercise; the full circle - the music has become the ornament, the ornament now a cornerstone in the Romantic vocabulary...
So much for our horizontal; as for the vertical, by the time of late Mahler, harmony had reached a point at which you might need all twelve notes at once to say what had to be said and the confusion in twentieth century music — or its sheer profusion — is often seen as an aftermath of this inevitable & inescapable point of no return.
Inevitable, inescapable?
The generation before Mahler sensed where Wagner was leading them, with his freedoms in harmony and melody; none more so than Brahms, interesting here because of his unusual, and often overlooked combination of scholarly attention to old music and vigorous sensuality. He edited works by Couperin and C.P.E.Bach, and he had a taste for natural horns, instruments whose limitations helped to offer an almost conventional harmonic anchor against his otherwise progressive harmonic tides. This juxtaposition of the ornament's old-fashioned rôle as tasteful addition and its Romantic signification as a key to unlock one's deepest aspirations, so to say, is well illustrated by the horn call that opens Brahms's 2nd piano concerto, a spread scale that draws strength from that central pivot:
MUSIC: horn call from opening of 2nd piano concerto
Brahms likes to shape his tune quite simply, almost as if opening up a chord before us, iterating and reiterating a basic key or sequence, emphasising a fairly stable harmony around which the lush adventures then orientate themselves.
MUSIC: Brahms piano quintet: opening rocking motif
It's a rearguard action, fought by a man surely aware of the almost chaotic implications of the breakdown of harmonic limits, perhaps hoping to delay that crucial moment when all the notes sound at once.
Mind you, I have another theory for the shape of Brahms's tunes: his hands rocked at the piano and his natural melodic experimentation led to shapes that pivot on the great thumbs of those big hands.
HUMS: DA— DA-DIDA-DADA-DUM, DA-DIDA-DADA- DIDA-DADA- DIDA-DADA-DUM [Brahms piano quintet: opening rocking motif]
Imagine, Bach and his great northern fingers, Mozart and his wily courtier's fingers, Beethoven and his fisticuff fingers, Chopin and his silvery delicate fingers, Mendelssohn and his lithe, fleet fingers, Schumann desperately trying to stretch his fingers, Brahms and his fat fingers: it opens up a whole new rationale to the history of western music...
Is that where the story really starts?