Music Theory

One of those penny-drop moments came to me when, as an undergraduate playing through some music I had written as a younger teenager (and finding it both better and worse than I remembered - does this happen to everyone when revisiting the efforts of their younger selves?), I came across a bit I'd always had to play quite carefully to make it sound okay. It could work all right, but if you didn't place it just so, it could sound a bit naff.

In the time between writing this music and revisiting it, I had been taught the concept of consecutive 5ths and 8ves, and the importance of avoiding them. This concept now revealed to me what the problem had been with my piece of juvenilia, and simultaneously made me grasp, emotionally, why I should care about this bit of theory.

There are other schools of thought on consecutives of course. Take Noel Coward:

I recently received an email asking if I would be 'willing to provide a 'musical brief' that will increase my understanding and handling of your arrangement'. I found this a somewhat baffling request, not least because the arrangement in question seemed to me relatively straightforward and I didn't know what it was that the person didn't already know. After all, isn't the performer's job to figure out how the music goes, and then perform that?

So my reply was to ask her to write what she thought it should be, and I'd tell if I thought she'd got the wrong end of the stick. This way, she'd get a brief that dealt with what it was she needed to know, and moreover, the knowledge would be stronger and more useful because she had generated it herself. (I am reminded of Nicholas Cook's point that reading someone else's musical analysis is a bit like asking someone to do your piano practice for you.)

Do you ever have the experience in rehearsal where people are singing the right note, but it's sitting just a shade too high or too low for the chord to gel? If you spend any time at all working a cappella, I bet you do (if you don't, you lead a charmed life).

I’m not talking about your regular, run of the mill tuning issues here, caused by tiredness, habit or faulty vocal production. I’m talking about a specific kind of fault where an ensemble that is basically in tune horizontally doesn’t always nail the vertical tuning.

Now, you can address this problem at an analytical level, asking people to nudge their note up or down a bit to get it into true. But this approach has drawbacks:

I've been thinking about rests. As in the silent bits within a piece of music, not as in putting your feet up with a cuppa. In fact, that distinction shows why people tend to overlook them. The name makes it sound like the music is off-duty.

If you use Sibelius as a notation program, you start off with a page-full or rests and the act of writing music involves replacing rests with sounds. This makes it feel like rests are the bits that you couldn't be bothered to compose.

But rests are not merely negative, not-music moments. They have value for both performers and listeners, and their deployment by composers and arrangers can involve a great deal of careful thought. They are there to do things for you that no other musical element can do.

Retroactive inevitability was a phrase used by the late Roger Payne, parody-writer extraordinaire, to describe that simultaneous sense of surprise and 'but of course'-ness you get when an end-rhyme forms a punchline.

You kind of know what's coming because of the structure that comes before, the length of phrase, the parallelisms formed by the rhyme scheme, and in the case of parodies also from your knowledge of the original song - though the structures need to make sense in their own right too. But the way the thought is completed is not entirely predictable, because the role of the comedy writer is to take us to places we hadn't necessarily thought to go.

So when the cadence-point comes, the moment of the 'reveal', it seems obvious - but only in retrospect.

Sometimes you read a book, and 20 years later you find there’s a single passage or argument that has stayed with you.There is a passage in Richard Dawkins’ book The Blind Watchmaker that’s like this for me. It’s where he’s taking on a critic of the theory of evolution who argues that the eye is such a complex and intricate organism that it could not possibly have evolved incrementally, because it would have had to go through so many intermediate stages in which it worked only imperfectly and would therefore confer no advantage on its owner.

Dawkins answer was (in my recollection):

The odds are that you are reading this through glass lenses.

For my recent visit to Ireland Unlimited, part of my brief was to work with the chorus on the concept of ‘tension and release’. This is one of those useful notions we bandy about all the time, though it’s not until you have to explain them that you stop and think about them in detail. So these are some of the thoughts I had when I was preparing this session.

The metaphor of tension and release in music is a surprisingly global one. It works in multiple dimensions both musically and experientially.

So, in emotional or experiential terms we might think of it as:

Anticipation – Arrival
Unstable – Stable
Exertion – Relaxation
Desire – Fulfilment

When I was writing up my visit to The Royal Harmonics back in August, an image that has long lurked in the back of my mind came into much more vivid focus: the idea of musical flow as water. The specific image that opened this image up was the association of the swell of melody with depth of feeling.

A melody that is sung note-to-note-to-note is somehow like a shallow puddle, with little wavelets little more than ripples. The peaks of the ripples are all the same height, and that height is only minimally above the surface of the water: they lap at the edge of the pool with no great effect. The ripples are also close together. So if you want your love-song to sound as shallow as a puddle, you should energise each note individually, but just by a bit, and not make much differentiation one from another.