The Problem with Big Tunes

Everyone loves a great, memorable tune.  We're talking here not about just melody, but melody that can be elevated to being called a tune. Such things are usually tonal, regularly phrased, and featuring a melody-and-accompaniment texture, often chorale-like and generously orchestrated.  They are instantly recognisable, make audiences feel good and can assure a composer a place in musical history.  And yet they are also quite rare beasts.  So why doesn't every composer write one?

Well, for a start, coming up with a really good Big Tune is potentially a laborious process.  In a classic example of the symbiosis involved in composition, the effectiveness of the melody goes hand-in-hand with the skillful use of harmony - both must be devised simultaneously to compliment one another, Since a great number of Big Tunes are felt to arouse feelings of national pride or other gushing emotions, the achievement of sincerity in such an entity can only be achieved by a relatively narrow repertoire of gestures - for example starting with a stable harmony to establish gravitas, or later a move to the minor in one of the phrases, returning to the major as if in reassurance.  On the most simple level it can be hard to consciously set out to 'write a Big Tune like the one in [piece x]' and avoid sounding like a pale imitation of it.

Second, the definition of a Big Tune will confine a composer to a relatively narrow musical style unless the music is deliberately a college or pot-pourri of different influences.  Stravinsky couldn't simply introduce a four-square anthem into, say, Rite of Spring, as it would sound ridiculous in this context and be completely contrary to the aims of the music. 

Structurally and technically speaking, they present several problems. Chief amongst these is that the attraction of the thing is its completeness - that is, the tune is a sixteen-bar entity which one can sing along to and which follows recognisable lines.  This is fine if the tune is to be a thing-in-itself, but less so if it is to be used as part of a wider form such as a movement of a symphony. Percy Grainger's famous quip that 'the trouble with folk songs is that when you've played it once the only thing you can do is repeat it' rings true, for good tunes are awkward to do anything else with. The more memorable a tune is in itself, the more 'closed' an entity it is likely to be, probably ending with a nice neat cadence in the tonic.  For use in a larger form, it usually comes to just too satisfying and complete an end, meaning that the music has to stop and re-start, and that there is a lack of tension around which to build the remainder of the piece.  Apart from anything else it can be difficult to chop up the tune into smaller segments with which any development will be facilitated; particularly for the listener who, having been drawn to the piece by tune, will probably find the fragmented version less appealing than the initial whole. It is possible - the finales of Tchaikovsky's Fifth and Nielsen's Third, the first and last movements of Elgar's First and several parts of Dvorak's Ninth are famous examples that manage it by various means, mostly by following it with something contrasting and then eventually bringing the Big Tune back at the end to satisfy listeners.  Sibelius pulls it off in Finlandia, in oh-so-Sibelian fashion building the preceding material from fragments of the theme, then juxtaposing the last note of it with the start of the next section (cleverly avoiding the stasis that would have resulted from bringing it to a close) and finally presenting only the first phrase of the melody in the coda. Even when the theme is allowed to run in the central section of the piece it is carefully varied in orchestration and not allowed to become sentimentalised.

Actually, Finlandia throws up a number of interesting avenues related to this topic.  The work was originally introduced, in a slightly extended form, as the finale of the rather uninspiringly titled suite Music for the Press Celebrations.  As the general feeling of the time was explicitly nationalistic, it is no surprise that the stirring tone poem quickly became performed on its own as an anthem of independence, and was as quickly banned by the Russians for this reason.  With all this national feeling contained within, it was assumed that the work had been composed with the intent of being as 'Finnish' as possible and thus included national folk music.  Sibelius had to repeatedly state that both the theme and the rest of the piece were categorically not based on any folk-songs.  The assumption of this is quite telling.  Folk music is not all melody and even rarer still the neat four-in-a-bar, major-key type (Finnish music often features five beats in the bar).  Did the symphonic content making up the other 3/4 of the piece actually matter or would it have been enough to have just written the famous tune?  Was the big tune even written as a crowd-pleaser or just for structural purposes in the first place?  Sibelius went on to arrange the central theme for choir (twice, in fact) setting the patriotic 'Finland Awakes' and thus joining a tradition that continues to this day of putting words to likely tunes, appropriate or not.

And that brings us on to the English equivalent of Finlandia, and another issue with Big Tunes - they become appropriated for hymns, songs, 'crossover' cover versions, etc, regardless of the composer's personal beliefs or the original context of the cultural artefact - and also become overplayed.  Having seen his suite become a rare hit amongst his output, Gustav Holst eventually grew to hate the incessant elevation of The Planets to the neglect of his other music (despite it justifiably being his best work) and in particular the setting of the famous melody in Jupiter to the text of I Vow To Thee, My Country and its subsequent use at every kind of pompous nationalistic occasion. Apart from the fact that the work is more concerned with astrological connotations from Indian mysticism than the fruits of the scientific advancements of the European Enlightenment, Holst was both a pacifist and an atheist and conspicuously from an immigrant background - Sweden via Latvia.  He would have been either horrified by or, more likely, resigned to, today's appropriation of this melody by jingoistic military occasions and flag-waving nationalism, and the assumption that it was written by a Very British composer.  Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No.1 and the 'Nimrod' movement of the Enigma Variations suffer much the same problems.  Elgar was also born an outsider (a working-class Catholic, making the patriotic 'Land of Hope and Glory' text somewhat out of place) and the Enigma Variations written as a highly personal piece, albeit in a generally light vein.  Worse, in such an extended work as this, everyone wants to hear the Big Tune to the exclusion of the rest of the piece, and because the particular excerpt is what is most readily associated with the composer, they are in danger of alienating audiences with anything that departs from this.  Returning to an earlier example, if you only knew the tune from Finlandia, then Sibelius' final two symphonies and The Tempest music must sound mightily strange on a first hearing.  Holst put off audiences simply by not re-writing The Planets in subsequent orchestral outings, a perfectly natural thing for a composer to do.

There are two happy upshots from all this.  Film music manages to use the idea of the Big Tune more successfully, largely due to its role as accompaniment.  If the audience needs to attach a particular recognisable theme to a character then this is a highly effective way to do it without having to worry about symphonic development (which would be too distracting for the medium). Indeed, the skillful writing of Leitmotif that works both as a film soundtrack and as concert excerpts is what constitutes the craft of John Williams and similar composers.

Secondly, it had been demonstrated on numerous occasions (in fact the majority of frequently-performed symphonic output) that it is not at all necessary to write a Big Tune in order to compose a first-rate piece that will not only be melodic but have audiences positively singing along. Haydn repeatedly proves that motivic writing can still sound tuneful and produce a technically stimulating work. Verdi writes almost totally melodically, yet actual four-square tunes as described above are confined to one or two choruses per opera, maximising their effectiveness in music that sets out to be crowd-pleasing (yet loses no integrity or intellectual appeal in the process).

Edit: Curiously, contemporary pop music, which is also generally populist (if not by definition), seems to be equally shy of using easily memorable Big Tunes. With a few notable exceptions, it is older popular styles which tend to be more melodic, possibly as a result of their shorter evolutionary path from blues and music-hall genres, and the notion of a hummable melody is clearly anathema to punk, rap, metal and other such styles.

A Child of the Snows: Ideas

Once one has decided firmly to write a piece, a good measure of how comfortably one is going to work on it is whether ideas readily spring to mind on first thinking or, in this case, a first reading of the text.  'Ideas' can be as specific as melodic fragments setting individual lines of text or as loose as a general feeling about texture or harmony for a certain passage.  Often, both present themselves at once.  The second type, whilst vague, is actually the more important for it dictates the character of the piece, which in turn has implications for forces required, structure and harmonic material. When starting a new composition, I try and look for the broader type first, as this provides both the foundations and later leads to some suggestion of how to 'build up' a work.

Allow me to go off at a slight tangent for a moment.  It is important to introduce the idea of 'superficial' and 'non-superficial' elements in a composition and stress the craft of balancing the two. 'Superficial' is not used here in a pejorative sense; it refers to elements that are literally 'on the surface' and which present themselves as being the salient feature to the listener at any given point in the music. Typically, melody (or at least the dominant textural line) is foremost, followed by harmony and orchestration. These tend to be elements which are subjected to frequent contrasts and mutations throughout of the course of even the smallest works, strengthening their role of arousing the listener's curiosity.  Non-superficial elements are generally concerns of structure, although the superficial elements also cross over into this category.  If orchestration is used to re-enforce the larger structure and texture (for example in an antiphonal passage in which two sets of instruments are alternated, or a solo instrument presenting an idea fixe) then it becomes less of an attention-grabbing device and instead a more fundamental part of the composition.  As far as I can see, the two exist in symbiosis, particularly so in a vocal work where both are ultimately derived from the texts being used. 

Gustav Holst once described composition as 'like approaching a house in fog. Slowly the details become clear - doors, windows.'  In a way, this is a simpler way of expressing what I have said above: the more superficial elements tend to appear later once they have a solid background to be positioned on. I suppose the same could be applied to the process of learning anything - for composing a piece is very much an exercise in learning how a certain body of material will best work itself out over a length of time. One has to start with the overall, generalised basics and then gradually refine the craft.

I already have the very big and some of the very small in ACOTS. At one end, the basic structure of the composition has been mapped out, and consists of an instrumental introduction, episodes of solo voice and choir, a faster middle section, more episodes of voice and choir, and a coda.  I rarely, if ever, write these structures down, as they can be recalled mentally with no effort.  This scheme is still flexible enough to allow for new ideas later on in the composing process and provides something akin to completing the edges of a jigsaw: smaller sub-assemblies can now be made up and can be roughly positioned in the central 'hole' for refinement later.  At the other end of the scale, I have been devising small snippets of melody, harmony and other surface ideas. In the next post I will be discussing some actual notes - ideas, motifs - and what can be done with them, but for now I want to conclude with discussion of a few overriding concepts regarding the surface of the music.

This most superficial element is, I suspect, the more fascinating aspect of composition for the interested reader. First, where do ideas come from?  The short answer is as far as I can tell, that thinking about the 'atmospheric' elements of the piece immediately starts one thinking about what fits this concept. Bear in mind I think about composition a lot without having to make much effort to do so or even being aware of it sometimes.  From then on it is simply a matter of trawling through one's thoughts on the piece until something of value suggests itself and gets written down.  So how does one decide what is worth keeping? And how exactly does one go about writing the surface material, spinning it all out in such a way that it doesn't end up as just aimless wandering?  These questions can be answered (at least in part) as one.  Returning to the opening paragraph, ideas, at least in my process, have to have some kind of context which dictates their inherent usefulness against various criteria.  In the case of this piece, there are several:

1. Setting the speech-rhythms of the text
2. Expressing the meaning and character of the text
3. Playability
4. Order of intensity

No.4 requires a little explanation but is actually simple enough. Order of Intensity (OoI) refers to the function of any element in the music with regards to whether it is pushing the music towards or away from a climactic point.  We could also term it 'dramaticism'.  This can be achieved using virtually any controllable parameter in the composition - volume, texture, orchestration, harmony, 'atmosphere'.  To use a very crude example, the successive diminished scales beloved of cinema pianists (typically accompanying Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock whilst someone is tied to the train tracks, etc) are very definitely an ascending OoI over a short temporal span. Most of the time in symphonic music, however, the OoI is much more subtle.  If you consider the opening of Brahms Second Symphony, the OoI in the cellos' four-note motif is very slight as it is moving towards a climax many bars away. The composer here requires a very stable sense of tonality and so uses just enough OoI to keep things moving forwards.  Even when this climax is reached there is still upwards OoI towards the biggest climax in the movement, towards the end of the movement and ultimately towards the end of the symphony.  As we can see, OoI is often operating on several planes at once in the same way as the structural plan described earlier.

So ideally, any ideas that spring to mind for inclusion in a piece will already suggest some degree of OoI in some context at some point in the work, however small or requiring of development/revision. If this is strong enough, such ideas can provide little 'strong points', around which the rest of the work can be completed. The fact that an ideas contains some readily suggested OoI might seem to apply to almost anything - hey, Bach Inventions and such like are often made up of the simplest and smallest groupings of notes - but we have to remember that we have started out with an 'atmospheric' concept and so are already selective in what we are looking for in the range and level of OoI (chiefly dictated by the scale and dramatic intensity of the work). In addition, I have a good idea of what (broadly, for I am open to influences) constitutes my own compositional style, further refining the process. Ideas that lie too far from these parameters seldom are considered even if they could potentially provide an excellent composition in other hands, simply because they are unsuitable for the task in hand. As ACOTS is a choral work there will be additional stimulus to be found in the texts used, which can suggest all manner of word-painting, colour, texture, etc.

What I've not mentioned so far is that these initial ideas almost always end up as significant motifs in the work, which brings us to a different area and technique of composition and one which constitutes a large part of how I work. In the next post, we will get to see some actual music. Promise.