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.

The golden rules of blogging

1. Always post something interesting

This goes without saying, really. I happen to seek 'interestingness' in everything even if its precise definition is somewhat woolly.  Perhaps it means less regular updates, but hey, quality not quantity. 

2. Never post something that people can get elsewhere

There must be millions of blogs about fashion, dogs, aimless musings on life and other trivia. Why would the average surfer pick one over another?  On the other hand, if you write quality material about Gambian and Senegalese stamp collecting, your life as a deckhand on a ship made from recycled chair legs or, in the case of ITM, classical music and other unique tidbits, it is more likely your blog will be unique enough to attract a small but regular band of readers.

3. Check your facts

Laziness in researching a subject, credulity that leads one to unthinkingly reproduce myths and a general lack of scrutiny blight much journalism today.  When done well, this point often feeds nicely into #1, for research often throws up further interesting facts and ideas.

4. Check presentation, spelling and grammar

Again, goes without saying. There's a spell-checker in Blogger, so it's not unreasonable to expect its use, along with a few minutes proofreading.  I find sloppy editing a real turn-off, although I would tentatively suggest that we should allow one error every now and then just to convince oneself the prose has been written by a human. Likewise, the layout of content should be condusive to readability and consistancy of style.  (Incidentaly, I've inserted one spelling or grammatical error in every sentence of this item - post any spotted in the comments box).

5. Never link to anything unnecessary

Very tempting to pepper a post with all manner of links - less easy to find the best one to illustrate the point.  Links should provide something the text can't, be that a picture, a diagram, more specialist knowledge of a subject or simply an interesting aside.

6. Care about what you're doing

This covers all the above.  Unsurprisingly, if I were to draw up a 'golden rules of composition' or indeed of anything I suspect they would be remarkably similar to the above.  When it comes to quality, the same principles apply to most things.  In short, good blogging is that which is professional, necessary and done with integrity.  All of my favourite blogs in the sidebar stick to these principles, and I strive for this one to do so too. 

Notes from a fellow

Periodically, I search for composition competitions I would consider entering, primarily those of an instrumental leaning. One of the major ones is the Toru Takemitsu Award, since 1997 an annual prize of several million Yen awarded to a young composer for an orchestral work composed in the spirit of the Japanese composer.  The judges befit the profile of the contest - Ligeti, Dutilleux, Berio, Andriessen, Lindberg, Benjamin, Reich and Lachenmann have all headed the panel during its history.  This year's is a figure I'm less familiar with - Salvatore Sciarrino, an IRCAM alumnus from Italy.  As a shortlist for the 2011 prize has already been drawn up, the website quotes Sig. Sciarrino's comments on the four pieces.  What I find more interesting, however, are his words on the submitted entries overall:

"The bulk of scores presented to the Composition Award offers a panorama of the present cultural situation in its complexity with all the problems that life involves (as it happens in all ages).

In my work of selection, I have been obliged to exclude some scores that were very distinct in their conception but too theoretical as to the use of instruments which made them unsuitable to be presented in a concert.

Many scores insist excessively on a hyperactivity of the orchestra, mainly rhetorical which on the contrary obtains a misleading movement, a feeling of emptiness. We deal with a diffuse aesthetical naivety which may be amazing but in reality is counterproductive.

In general, I have the impression of an improvement in musical competence and widening of information : today the technological means available to composers are much larger. This may also produce a big disadvantage, that puts(sets) combining systems against creative and inventive thinking. So the impulse to fill the page mechanically is present even in manually written works.

Even though as an optimist, I consider creativity inseparable from the human being (and therefore its development unforeseeable), I have to refuse the lack of personal effort. If the compilation is done for itself, if individual answers are silent, then the more important experiences of the modern tradition weaken and disappear. We risk, as Musil wrote, being a laboratory where no experiments are concluded. Continuity is one of the basic assumptions of the survival of culture. 

We have to further engage ourselves in music because the artist's task is to build and discover the new, the dreams, the utopia, the future.

Of course my considerations refer to social topics of such a level that cannot be analyzed on this occasion but that I cannot pretend to ignore."

I find a lot to agree with here. Although his music is unfamiliar to me, philosophically Sciarrino seems very close to my own compositional outlook.  He firstly endorses a point of common sense, although I can't be sure if by 'theoretical as to the use of instruments' he means that the instrumentation of the works was merely too flexible or whether the composer had actually asked for things not technically possible from the players.  The subsequent points are rather more insightful. In discouraging 'hyperactivity', Sciarrino is essentially warning against needless complexity which diminishes musical effectiveness, and more, that such action constitutes a technical error because it weakens the emotive argument of the work.  The undiscerning use of mechanical process, be that in the form of technology or any contrived systems, may also turn out to be detrimental to works because we become too reliant on such schemes and not on creative impulse.  Best of all, he considers a future devoid of 'personal effort' (the original phrase 'mancanza di sforzo personale' - a 'lack of personal force' is perhaps more compelling) antithetical to the deserved progression of culture.  Indeed, the entire thrust of Sciarrino's comments point towards a caveat I hold to be of the highest importance: that the personality and subjective input of the composer, the individual, is vital to the success, survival and value of their work.  I find the penultimate statement to be a pleasingly elegant way of expressing this.