Having lived in the countryside over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time studying birds and recording their distinctive calls, merging interest and pleasure. The jay is a mimetic impresario, shrieking like a banshee or warbling like a flute. The cardinal boasts several different registers, including a wolf-whistle and a truncated siren. The dark-eyed junco’s trill and chirp lack variation. Nuthatches squeak, robins cheep and cedar waxwings emit a scrannel falsetto like a high-pitched shree. Downy woodpeckers drum, their hatchlings sounding like lighter clicks. Crows and grackles resemble Tom Waits on steroids. A sparrow I grew fond of repeated a six-note flourish like an unresolved motif. Chickadees emit a flat peeping sound, their eponymous call at times a form of recognizable communication. Often when we put out seed they signal to each other the availability of grub with an eight-note dee. Quite remarkable, really.
But none of them produces melody.
Even the famed Keatsian nightingale, pouring forth its soul “in some melodious plot/Of beechen green,” does not really sing. Tristan thrumming like a nightingale to summon Isolde – cum russino, as the 12th century poet Thomas of Britain described it – would scarcely have worked in reality. It couldn’t have sounded any worse than Igor Stravinsky’s grating symphonic poem Le chant du rossignol (“Song of the Nightingale”). (On a personal note, my natal Russian surname, Soloveitchik, means “nightingale”, adopted by my forebears to signal their duty as Temple singers.) More to the point, the term “birdsong” is a misnomer, or merely a metaphorical designation for ease of reference. A sonogram display used in analyzing the structure of bird calls does not track a melody but a succession of syllables simulating a few blips on a hospital monitor.
Birdsong is a miracle, but it’s not melody; even the famed Keatsian nightingale does not really “sing”. At left, A Nightingale Singing in the Dark of Night, by Sue Podger; at right, Keats Listening to a Nightingale on Hampstead Heath, by Joseph Severn, 1845.All of this got me thinking one day about melody, one of the great mysteries of human existence. Although like everyone else I know a melody when I hear one, I have no idea what a melody actually is, that is, what I know on one level I don’t know on another, a paradox of epistemology. I decided to consult my dictionaries, if only as a preliminary step toward comprehension.
The Santorella Dictionary of Musical Terms defines melody as “an organized succession of three or more notes.” This is clearly an unsatisfactory definition since a minimal sequence of notes, indefinitely repeated, possibly with little or no pitch variation, does not constitute what we’d call a “tune”. After all, nothing prevents us from generating a collocation of notes which may strike us as a sonic structure but which we would never hear as a melody.
Austrian (later American) composer and musical theorist Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal or 12-note compositions, in which all 12 semi-tones of the chromatic scale (manifested in the piano, for example) have equal weight and importance, do not yield melody but, as Michael Walsh writes in The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, “music worked out on paper.” They express a Marxist conception of post-capitalist culture in which all citizens – aka units – are equal regardless of talent, intelligence or productivity. This is neither music nor melody; it is equity politics of the dreariest sort.
The Oxford Dictionary of Musical Terms provides a slightly better description of the phenomenon we call “melody” but fails to consider it in its essence, where it comes from and why it should exist. To say it is “a succession of notes of varying pitch, with an organized and recognizable shape” gets us only part of the way. So are many other audible events that are not especially or even remotely “melodic”, such as certain bird calls, carillon chimes and even construction din. To attribute melody to dolphin-speak, as the Oxford does, begs the question. Similarly, the theremin-like wails of whales cannot be heard as melody. To categorize melody as one of the “fundamental capacities of the human species” is true but unexceptionable. It leaves a long epistemic road still to travel. It remains as much a truism I share as a riddle I address. More on this later.
The great Victorian novelist George Eliot spoke of the mysterious way “sounds link themselves into melody in the mind of the creative musician,” though the real question is how sounds link themselves into melody in the mind of any human being, how such a thing is even made to happen in the first place. Psychoanalyst and author Anthony Storr in Music and the Mind argues that, “Music can best be understood as a system of relationships between tones…as ways of ordering sound.” Again, true, but it does not get to the root of what we recognize as the singular property of sound that we call melody, or at least hint at the puzzle of origins – which I regard as the critical question.
One thinks, too, of the ineffable ‘sweetness’ of melody, what the Greeks called mélos or mélisma – song, air, tune – derived etymologically from méli – honey. Which brings to mind Aristotle’s maxim, quoting the revered poet and musician Musaeus: ‘Song is to mortals of all things the sweetest.’
The issue is how we hear melody as a unique, modular configuration of sounds that are tangible and yet somehow incorporeal, as if inhabiting an ethereal region between the neural and the spectral and eliciting a vast range of sympathetic response, as no other sonic skein is capable of doing. The veritable language of adjectives that has evolved to convey melody’s effects on us hints at this singular aspect: tunes are said to be catchy, moving, uplifting – lightening our moods, causing our hearts to skip a beat – evocative, brooding, soaring, thought-provoking (or perhaps silly, childish, primitive or ugly). You might even have thought up your own for your personal favourite.
One thinks, too, of the ineffable “sweetness” of melody, what the Greeks called μέλος (mélos) or μέλισμα (mélisma) – song, air, tune – derived etymologically from μέλι (méli) – honey. Which brings to mind Aristotle’s maxim in Book VIII of the Politics, quoting the revered poet and musician Musaeus: “Song is to mortals of all things the sweetest.” Obviously, some melodies will be heard as “dark” or “menacing”, but there is much truth in the philosopher’s observation.
I’m not eager to dive into the arcana of musical theory, the history of musical development, its technical armature and incunabula, or even the romantic pathos of tonal impressionism. But it would be appropriate to distinguish between timbre-based tonal organization (TO) and frequency-based pitch organization (FO).
“Timbre” comes from the Greek tympanon, “kettledrum”, related to the modern-day timpani. TO involves a personal orientation, resting on “personal song”, defined as a system of personal identification through individualized patterns of rhythm and timbre like a human voice or musical instrument, as we will explore further on. Frontiers in Psychology explains: “We recognize a person’s voice and a musical instrument by its timbre.” Timbre, then, is about the quality or nature of the sound. Frequency in music “refers to the speed of vibration of a sound wave,” which determines its “pitch”, the perceptual property that enables us to judge sounds as “higher” or “lower”. An aspect of physics, mathematically related and measurable, frequency is integral to melody and, accordingly, FO refers to an orientation to music centred on melody.
“Song is to mortals of all things the sweetest,” wrote Aristotle, and the ancient Greeks named it “mélos”, derived from “méli” – honey. Depicted at left, Apollo, God of Light, Eloquence, Poetry and the Fine Arts with Urania, Muse of Astronomy, by Charles Meynier, 1798; at right, a musical scene painted by the Niobid Painter (470 to 450 BC), Walters Art Museum.
Of course, music in the fullest sense – timbre, tempo, pitch, the diverse scales, “colour”, interval, duration, counterpoint, instrumentation, vocals, their combinations and temporal relationships – is a central rune and oracle of human spirit and culture. Its intrinsic components in their multiple arrangements, however, can be mastered. Here I’m preoccupied with something no less, or even more, fundamental and maybe unfathomable; namely, the enigma of melody, that “something” which cannot be mastered or rehearsed into being. It is as if one comes upon it because it is somehow already there.
How Melody Came to Be?
There is plainly no way of knowing with any degree of certainty how melody originated; here we must rely on speculation. Did disparate sounds in nature, as some hypothesize – the boom of thunder suggesting bass notes, or avalanches and earthquakes producing eerie ribbons of sound, or the tremolo of “birdsong” provoking delight – implant the notion in the minds of our hominid ancestors, like a society of Calibans, Shakespeare’s feral creature from The Tempest, who dreamed “sweet airs that give delight and hurt not”? Or something, maybe, like poet Matthew Arnold’s description of the tide in his great poem “Dover Beach”:
…the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Did the sounds of nature implant the notion of music in our ancestors? “The grating roar/Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,” as poet Matthew Arnold (right) wrote. At left, Wreckers, Coast of Northumberland, by Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1834.Did modulations in speech, phatics and vocatives eventuate in the reproduction of simple melodic sequences? Impossible to tell and, from my perspective, unlikely.
Or was melody, as I suspect, somehow in occultation from the very beginning, predating actual speech, penetrating the chromosomes, a bestowal that can be either latent or manifest, depending on the individual or the culture? It was this riddle that I tried to grasp in a short poem, which failed to get to the source but implied a myth of origins:
The Piano in the House in the Woods
The house was in the middle of the woods,
a two-mile footpath through the bush
the only way to get there. You hiked in summer,
strapped snowshoes on in winter, moving in
through birch and pine as silver and as green
as fish scales trapped in ice. But we know all
about the house, how it was built and why
and who worked his fingers down
to fit one plank upon another plank.
We know less about that vintage piano,
how they hauled it through forest and brush,
wedged it through the narrow door much too small,
set it there among a crowd of rockers, tables, sofas.
We know less about that piano
than we know of house and woods together.
Unless we say the piano had always
been there, and they built the house around it.
Or, as some may believe, is melody the hosannahs of heaven filtering down to the fallen creature in his travails, subsequently emerging in the spirit? Is this how Jubal, as Genesis 4:21 informs us, became “the father of all such as handle the harp and organ”? One may recall Milton in Book XI of Paradise Lost, who seems to refer to theories of speculative music (musica speculativa) that were in vogue in the 17th century. The notion is that the music created by man on Earth (musica practica) is an attempt to replicate the celestial music of the spheres. Interestingly, the music of the spheres (musica universalis) was thought to be based on the ancient pentatonic scale conceptually expounded by Pythagoras, predicated on the known five planets.
Sometimes a melody seems to resemble a disembodied soul seeking a body to be born in. You can sense it on its way to its future home, plangent yet insistent, a kind of mellifluous urgency that announces itself as if it were fully formed and needing only to be properly received.
It seems pertinent at this juncture to mention what appears to be the oldest musical instrument in the world, a flute dated to an age of 60,000 years and used by Neanderthals, made from the femur of a cave bear, discovered in Slovenia. Experiments appear to confirm that it was indeed a musical instrument, with four pierced holes whose spacing is consistent with the diatonic scale and thus capable of musical expression. According to the Narodni Muzej Slovenije, the instrument allows for “a wide range of sonority in melodic movement.”
Controversy, however, over the nature and purpose of the flute continues to ruffle the musical academy. Some studies regard the instrument as the work of scavenging hyenas or gnawing bears, which seems improbable. And as my editor George Koch at C2C points out, the find sparked a wider debate about whether the musical sense is a social construct, or a product of an innate harmonic faculty, or a function of mathematical ratios, or is nothing less than a “transcendent blessing”. This is precisely the issue we are plumbing here.
Sometimes a melody seems to resemble a disembodied soul seeking a body to be born in, as in certain religious concepts associated with diverse Eastern faiths and some Western philosophical traditions, like Orphism or NeoPlatonism. You can sense it on its way to its future home, plangent yet insistent, a kind of mellifluous urgency that announces itself as if it were fully formed and needing only to be properly received. Your job is to let it happen, to offer hospitality. As John Keats wrote in a letter to John Taylor in 1818, “If Poetry comes not as naturally as Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” The same may be true of melody.
At other times, the melody needs to be sought, coaxed into existence, drawn out of its distal reluctance or fey mischievousness. One knows it’s there, hovering just beyond the horizon of consciousness, but hardly audible, or even completely inaudible – all one intuits is an acoustic shadow. There’s nothing the composer or songwriter can do in such cases except hum and strum, or randomly plunk the ivories, without plan, even without conviction, intermittently, for as long as it takes – days or weeks. As one poet said, when inspiration flags, one had better force the issue rather than emerge empty-handed from one’s solitude. There is some truth to this also.
Of course, sometimes accidents happen. Sometimes a melody appears out of nowhere, prompted perhaps by a bird call or a lyric forming itself in one’s mind – or by nothing at all – which implies that a meaningful series of notes in some inscrutable way pre-existed its emergence into the material world even without one’s initial awareness or vague presentiment. It might also be the result of a cacophony of unrelated sounds from which a singable tune unexpectedly disenjangles itself, like a cellular mutation, a messed-up gene that leads to something complex and resilient: as biologists say, “ A flaw that is wrong in exactly the right way.” The puzzle only deepens.
What I’m trying to get at is not only how a melody comes to be but what a melody actually is, in effect, the very ontology of song. Rhythm is theoretically understandable – a regular or syncopated beat, kinetic meter or the mensural unit of time – no doubt based on the heartbeat, the accentuations of the pulse over which rhythm is superposed.
But melody? One can map it, but who can understand it?
The Western Connection – Uniquely Melodic or “Oppressive”?
By “melody”, clearly I intend something other than “music” – which is a composite phenomenon consisting of combinations of tones vocal and instrumental, including rhythm, melody and harmony – and something other or more evolved than the monophony of early plainsong or vulgarity. It’s obvious, too, that I hear melody with Western ears, and thus don’t find the music of many other traditions especially melodic.
Here we must be careful, for melody consists of a vast range of sonorities, some more pronounced, others less so. The central test for the most distinctive form of melody is whether it can be hummed. A piece of music may be sung or chanted, but if it cannot be readily hummed without words or instrumentation to float it along, it is not, as we say, particularly “melodic”, though it will still qualify as melody in the more comprehensive sense.
To take a few examples. The sinuous Greek zeibekiko is both dance and music, often requiring voice and lyric to support it. Its roots are in Asia Minor and its name derives from the Turkish military Zybeks. The time signature is generally 9/8 or 9/4, and the bouzouki, its natural instrument, is tuned to the Dorian mode D scale. It is largely improvisatory and is pretty well non-hummable, and therefore not melody in its purest state, though no less primal and moving.
Not all music is melodic, argues the author, citing the Greek folk dance zeibekiko (top), the oeuvre of Persian virtuoso Yasamin Shah Hosseini (bottom left) and the maqam, or Islamic court music, as performed by the Uzbek Bukhara mausoleum ensemble (bottom right); however luxuriant and visceral, it is not melodic in the purest sense. (Sources of photos: (top) The Greek Herald; (bottom left) Music Boat; (bottom right) Alexander Jumaev/Voices on Central Asia)Oriental music is based largely on the pentatonic scale – Indian ragas are one example – which I can appreciate only in isolated passages. Arabic, Turkish and Persian music are compelling to the attuned ear; one thinks of the dancing maqam (Islamic court music) or quartertones on the oud (from which the European lute is descended), as in the oeuvre of Persian virtuoso Yasamin Shah Hosseini. Arab popular music, on the other hand, frequently shows the influence of the Western/Latin/Spanish tradition, as in the 1996 prize-winning song, long one of my favorites, by Amr Diab, “Habibi Ya Nour El Ain” (“My love, You Are the Glow in My Eyes”). It is as if the oriental ear recognizes that most popular tunes use the diatonic scale, which includes both the major scale, or Ionian mode, and the natural minor scale, or Aeolian mode, comprising the same number of notes but in a different pitch. This forms the kernel of melody in the quintessential sense.
Melody may have its grain and weave in human nature, as some contend, or in the transmundane realm of spirit, as others believe, but as we’ve observed it is inflected differently in different cultures. Tonal systems vary dramatically; yet, though all these systems will qualify as music, not all can be described as wholly or continuously melodic as Westerners generally understand it. Microtonal scales, which divide the octave into twenty-four equal units and thus establish a distance between successive notes as quarter tones, do not lend themselves to sustained hummable sequences. They rely largely on voice, technical adroitness and the cultural archive to achieve an auditory identity. They can be quite luxuriant as well as visceral but do not feature what we may call the sumptuous compositional diapason or the opulence of full melody native to the Western library.
I venture to say that melody in its density, scope and diversity as it has been heard, cultivated, refined and transmitted is one of the signatures of Western civilization, an aural distillate of its essence.
But is it all just a matter of taste? The aforementioned Storr advises that, “We clear our minds of the belief that the Western tonal system…is derived from nature [so that] we may more easily be able to accept other musical systems as equally valid.” The idea that music is a mere cultural construct has gained in ferocity in contemporary “post-colonial theory”, which insists that all musics are equal (and Western music possibly even “oppressive”). One can feasibly stipulate that all musical systems are equally valid as systems, while insisting that full-noted melody (with its spanning, complementary semitones and the melancholy valence of minor notes) appears to be another matter entirely, as something largely endemic to the Western tradition.
Three broad examples from history: the Bible is replete with references to song; the Greeks pioneered a plurality of melodic modes – Dorian, Phrygian, Mixolydian, Lydian, Aeolian, whose intervals were based on mathematical ratios discovered by Pythagoras, which came to be known as “the fingerprints of the Gods”; and Catholic Church monophony eventually developed into lavishly complex polyphony. I venture to say that melody in its density, scope and diversity as it has been heard, cultivated, refined and transmitted is one of the signatures of Western civilization, an aural distillate of its essence.
I am by no means suggesting that Western monophonic forms or other musical and tribal traditions are not valid and authoritative and beautiful in themselves, but I am proposing that melody per se, in its richest and most memorable or nuclear form, was detected – and perfected – by the Western sensibility. I will surely be accused of ethnocentrism in advancing such a hypothesis – the “decolonization” crowd’s standard rebuke – but it seems persuasive to me and at least worth considering. I simply decline to join those who denounce all things Western as inferior to and/or oppressive of the various alternatives.
All this discussion notwithstanding, I still can’t say what melody is. I do know that melody in its purest form is something that can be hummed, and that I can’t hum plainchant or rap or Ravi Shankar. I would also contend that mere chant is neither music nor melody, but vocal recitation erected on a steady beat. Hummability, instinct with variation and innovation, is the basic litmus test of melody.
Melody is intrinsically hummable, the author asserts; it can be as simple as Paul Anka’s (top left) 1957 hit “Diana”, the sweet and consoling 2nd movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s (top right) 1808 Pastoral, the exquisite oboe solo from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (at bottom left, a ballet performance at the Mariinsky Theatre, Saint Petersburg, Russia) or the scratchy sound of Louisiana Cajun zydeco (bottom right). (Sources of photos: (top left) Museiverkets Bildsamlingar The Picture Collections, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; (bottom left) Jack Devant ballet photography, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0; (bottom right) Witty Name, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)
Melody is also something that is deeply satisfying, affording us an inexplicable pleasure that is not somatic, whether we are listening to the scratchy sound of Louisiana Cajun zydeco or the exquisite oboe solo from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. (It is not true, as the old joke has it, that the oboe is an ill wind that nobody blows good.) Melody is sensuous but not sensual, appealing to a dimension of our being that oscillates between the emotional and the spiritual, which is why it can affect our mood in profound ways and compel us to echo, duplicate, replay, rehearse and listen to it over and over again.
Melody can be as simple as, say, Paul Anka’s early hit “Diana” (despite the teenage rubbish of its lyrics) or as hauntingly original as Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, which everybody knows from dentists’ waiting rooms. Classical pieces in the form of symphonic or ensemble compositions are certainly not hummable in their lengthy and intricate, horizontal/vertical continuities, but we discern themes and melodies, cantilena passages, that are richly accessible and that we often find ourselves driven to reproduce. The second movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral is sweetness and consolation personified, and endlessly hummable. My mother swears that my father’s nightly playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata when she was dying of pleurisy saved her life, the melody gliding in three movements from dream to sprightliness to a tempestuous command lifting her from the darkness.
Dante’s Divine Comedy (1320) was brought to life by Franz Liszt’s choral Dante Symphony of 1857; the famous Paolo and Francesca story is evoked by a melodic passage that can bring tears to one’s eyes in a way the poet’s judgemental interpretation does not. Shown at top, Dante holding a copy of the Divine Comedy, by Domenico di Michelino, 1465; at bottom, Liszt’s Dante Symphony, performed at Teatro Verdi di Salerno, Trieste, Italy. (Source of bottom photo: Operabase)Dante’s Divine Comedy is by general agreement one of the greatest epic poems ever composed, rivalling Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. It certainly has no need of operatic or symphonic rendering, though it has both: the Inferno by the Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti and the Dante Symphony, a choral production in two parts composed by Franz Liszt. I can say little about the first, never having seen it performed or listened to it all. But Liszt’s symphonic work, with its ascending and descending semitones and chromatic scales, brings home the immeasurable power of Dante’s poem. The famous Paolo and Francesca story is evoked by a melodic passage of wistful and surpassing beauty, a motif that can bring the tears to one’s eyes as Dante’s judgemental interpretation of the tale does not.
Anyone can name musical compositions whose melodies become earworms – though precisely why remains inscrutable.
Baroque music is virtually threaded with melodic passages both lively and melancholy, a music of paramount hummability. The same applies to opera, as noted in passing. We may not speak Italian or German or French, but arias from Rigoletto, Manon Lescaut, Die Zauberflöte, Faust, Turandot and many others run through our minds on their own sonorous power. The “Nessun Dorma” aria from Turandot sung by world-class tenors is unforgettable – I’m thinking now of Christopher Macchio’s incredible performance at Donald Trump’s second campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania (where he had narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July).
Offenbach’s Barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann is enough to drive one crazy with the need to repeat. The “Jewel Song” from Charles Gounod’s Faust, especially the bravura performance by Angela Gheorghiu of The Royal Opera, and of course, the celebrated “Soldiers Chorus” from Act V both show how we can be insensibly “transported” to another, seemingly prior realm by the almost evanescent force of melody and its embodiment in voice.
Arias like those in Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto (at left, a scene from the Canadian Opera Company production) or “Nessun Dorma” from Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot (at right, performed by Christopher Macchio) run through our minds on their own sonorous power. (Sources of photos: (left) Canadian Opera, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; (right) Out and About/YouTube)Let me also stipulate that one doesn’t need to love classical music to appreciate and be moved by melody; melody is universally accessible to anyone who cares to listen. My mentioning of Paul Anka above was deliberate, and one could as easily insert ABBA as an example. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s light operas are, in my estimation, works of melodic genius, especially the melodies from The Phantom of the Opera and Cats. Ditto Gilbert and Sullivan, though the rhyming cleverness of their lyrics tends to rival the melodies. Anyone can name musical compositions whose melodies become earworms – though precisely why remains inscrutable.
I don’t mean to scant the importance of vocal quality and its unique character – the texture, brightness, depth or vibrancy of voice as instrument – as well as musical accompaniment or arrangement. The singular timbre of voice, along with instrumentation and arrangement, are seamlessly integrated with melody, but melody is the otic prerequisite. Of course, a debilitated voice can distract from the apprehension of melody, as can a poor arrangement, which does not change the fact that melody is primary. Better all three, of course, with voice and consecution accentuating melody.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals, like The Phantom of the Opera (top) and Cats (bottom), are works of melodic genius, in the author’s judgment. (Sources of photos: (top) m.media-amazon.com; (bottom) Jamie J Gray, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)Closer to home, the same response applies to country-and-western, American musical theatre and any number of pop exemplars and ballads. “Three chords and the truth,” coined in the 1950s by C&W legend Harlan Howard and used uncountable times since, accounts for many a successful song. Many readers will have an ever-swelling Spotify playlist of haunting or captivating numbers.
The point I am trying to make is that melody carries the lyrics, rather than vice-versa, regardless of how good or memorable the lyrics. The Eagles in “Hotel California” gave us a phrase that entered the common idiom – “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave” – yet without the melody and the extraordinary guitar work, it would have lacked resonance.
In an article about Church music for Catholic Answers, Sarah Cain develops a similar idea. “Sacred music,” she writes, “can be seen to clothe the liturgy in beauty, offering everything that we have in one complete act of worship. The beauty, prayerfulness, and nobility of the Mass are in no small way influenced by the sacred music that accompanies it.” One might add that the music is more than influence or accompaniment, it is an act of delivery powered by beauty. Without a compelling or seductive melody, the lyrics would signify far less, if anything. Even Musak, despite its predictable and numbing shallowness, bears witness to the ineffable communion between spirit and font.
Two Theories
Melody. What it is, how it begins, where it comes from, how we recognize and respond to its auditory contours as something constitutively different from all other sound patterns, why it seizes on memory and mood. All questions I cannot answer and mysteries I cannot plumb. The evolution of language – spoken and written – into myriads of complex forms and structures is no less enigmatic. But speech has a purpose, communication, messaging. The “engineering design” behind our sentences serves to ensure comprehension, as Steven Pinker puts it in The Sense of Style. “The most remarkable aspect of language,” he writes, “is its expressive power, its ability to convey an unlimited number of ideas via a structured stream of sound” in order to transfer information.
What purpose does the “structured stream” of melody have? Surely not communication in the pragmatic way we understand it. Animals clearly possess an embryonic language to signal danger, objects in the environment, visceral states, or to attract mates, but they do not sing or hum, nor do they command nigh-infinite variations. Our cat Stanislav routinely picked out some impressive arpeggios on the keyboard, a feat I quite admired, but they were not melodies.
Although animals and (perhaps) plants can recognize music, they cannot produce it. Melody is beyond their ken. They can ‘feel’ content, apparently, but they cannot lift their voices in song.
There is no melody in the animal kingdom, just as there is no melody in nature. True, the Internet is replete with videos of animals gravitating toward music: there is, for instance, Debussy to an entranced elephant, or a sprightly jig to a fascinated whale, or Bach to a paddock of appreciative horses. But appreciating something is utterly different from singing, playing and composing.
We are told that plants respond to musical phenomena as well. During Covid the Barcelona Opera House hosted the UceLi Quartet playing before a full house of over 2,000 houseplants. “They can’t ‘listen’ to music the same way we do of course, but the vibrations put off by the sound of music can be picked up on by plants,” according to the Moana Nursery, with beneficial or negative effect depending on the genre. Plants can “feel” happy or sad when harkening to music.
As mentioned, music is a broader category than melody, but melody is its core, its marrow, so to speak. The point, however, is obvious: although animals and (perhaps) plants can recognize music, they cannot produce it. Melody is beyond their ken. They can “feel” content, apparently, but they cannot lift their voices in song. They can experience dread, but they cannot whistle past the graveyard.
A strange theory was recently proposed. According to Stuart Hameroff, an anaesthesiologist and director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, the brain processes information emanating from the quantum dimension (that is, the abstract dimension or dimensions beyond or within regular space and time) across multiple scales, each vibrating at different frequencies. Nobel Laureate Sir Robert Penrose, who has collaborated with Hameroff in a major volume, Consciousness and the Universe, has come to the same conclusion. Quantum vibrations act as signals transduced by the brain into feelings, thoughts, perceptions and images, that is, into consciousness.
The brain, says Hameroff, resembles a “Quantum Orchestra”, with resonances and harmonies over different frequencies, much as in music. “And so,” he speculates, “I think consciousness is more like music than it is a computation.”
Is this where melody comes from, the tuneful correlate of discrete packets of energy? The brain presumably gathers quantum signals, amplifying and organizing them into patterns we interpret as the contents of our thought and, possibly, also culminates in the awareness of melodic sequences. Yet even were this the case, I still cannot define what melody actually is and how we can recognize it as melody. An address, as it were, is not a house. And the address can be inaccurate.
The question asks itself: is a quantum theory of melody persuasive? One mulls James Joyce’s famous triplet from Finnegans Wake – “Three quarks for Muster Mark!/Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark/And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark” – which gave Nobelized physicist Murray Gell-Mann the name for these infinitesimal particles that swarm the quantum plenum. Are they also part of the musical stave? Penfield believes there is something taking place in the quantum reduction of the wave-function – the weird fact that quantum particles coexist in multiple states at the same time – that gives rise to non-computational reception issuing in conscious experience, which would include the reception of melody as a recognizable phenomenon.
Or, again, is there a spiritual donation from the mind of God which explains the reception of melody? The command Caedmon received from the angel in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People is, as has been diversely rendered, “Sing me Creation” – not lecture or sermonize me. We can surmise that the text would have been an expression of devotion, the melody a homophonic replica of the divine creation felt in the proximal depths of the self. In The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman concludes that we are all avatars of a superconscious or arch-conscious intelligence and that, as avatars, we are “conscious aleph infinity agents” who interact with the “Aleph” via the interface with spacetime. Heady stuff.
“Sing me Creation” was the command Caedmon received from an angel in an Old English history; could melody be a spiritual donation from the mind of God? Shown at left, Caedmon, Sing Some Song To Me, by Joseph Ratcliffe Skelton (1865-1927); at right, Caedmon’s Awakening, by Arthur Hughes (1832-1915).In any event, what music and its animating spirit melody seem to tell us is that consciousness, interior presence, does not originate in the brain, is not part of brain chemistry. It may come, as Hameroff posits, “from the universe”, triggering the microtubules in the brain that Hameroff and Penfield believe create the quantum symphony. The theory seems almost theosophical, reprising late 18th century composer/philosopher Fabre d’Olivet’s thesis in The Secret Lore of Music: The Hidden Power of Orpheus that music bears an inner kinship to the genesis of the universe.
In The Passions of the Soul, philosopher René Descartes held that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul. Hameroff refines the notion, arguing that the brain is a kind of antenna, a collector and transmitter, a mediator of signals transduced into introspective awareness. Or perhaps the non-material soul may be open to the music of the spheres and the voice of God heard as melody and inflected variously in different cultures, expressed as both need and wonder, as the impulse to sing Creation.
Melody is a gift from somewhere else. There is an element of the miraculous about melody. It has one wanting to tango with a quark. It has one wanting to play the Neanderthal flute. It has one longing to sing Creation.
What, finally, can we say about melody? Melody is infinite, there is no conceivable end to its permutations and combinations. It gestures, like the conductor’s wand, toward the existence of a transcendent dimension, a universal conservatory. And in its fullest sense, known as the major scale of the diatonic mode, it is principally to be found in the soaring amplitude of the Western canon, both orchestral and melodic. If we were to be honest, we would have to admit that there is nothing quite like it anywhere else in the world. The overriding consideration, however, is that we are the only species that makes music, as the Oxford Dictionary of Musical Terms stipulates, but also the only species that is able to intuit or “formulate” melody as music’s germinal crux.
Everywhere we go melody permeates our lives. It makes its presence felt even if its source appears to be absent. To reiterate, I cannot say if melody emerges from the cryptic quantum world with its bosons and fermions or from the equally esoteric spiritual domain with its cherubim and ophanim. It may be channeled by the human brain, but it is not created by a cerebral instrument. Steven Pinker refers to the language of reflective thought as “mentalese”.
In the same way, we might consider the peculiar property of the brain not to create but to articulate the intrinsic grammar and rhetoric of music as generating a language we might call “melodese”, another form of human discourse, or descant. The brain is more like poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Eolian Harp, whose strings are “caressed” by an “intellectual breeze” that animates the soul and that we interpret as melody, whose pedigree will always remain obscure.
The mystery only continues to deepen. Song, St. Augustine observes in Book XI of the Confessions, is the consciousness of time; in fact, for the Church doctor, we might say it is both the very medium of time and the very experience of its propulsive force – which does not aid us much in delving into the origins of melody anymore than it clarifies the meaning and nature of time.
In conclusion, I can only say that melody is a gift from somewhere else. There is an element of the miraculous about melody, and like a miracle it cannot be explained, only marvelled at. It has one wanting to tango with a quark. It has one wanting to play the Neanderthal flute. It has one longing to sing Creation. It has one wishing to harmonize with God. It has one believing in the reality of the numinous.
David Solway’s latest prose book is Crossing the Jordan: On Judaism, Islam, and the West (New English Review Press, 2023). A new poetry chapbook, From the Sommelier’s Notebook, was released in July 2024 (Little Nightingale Press). Solway has produced two CDs of original songs: Blood Guitar and Other Tales (2014) and Partial to Cain (2019) on which he is accompanied by his pianist wife Janice Fiamengo. A third CD, The Dark, is in planning.
Source of main image: Shutterstock.
