The Meaning Of A Melody
Have you ever sat and considered why music can manipulate your emotions? Why, generally speaking, major chords sound ‘happy’ and minor chords sound ‘sad’? Or perhaps why guitar riffs can be so addicting and make you feel something raw and powerful? There are many mysteries in music—the one I will focus on today is that of the melody (at some other point I will visit the idea of ambience, but not today).
There’s a few ways I could discuss music. I could wade into the waters of theoretical rigor, or I could demonstrate music through my writing. I’ll do the latter, because this isn’t academia, and it’ll be more fun to get groovy with it.
There are some songs that are difficult for me to listen to, because they bring with their sounds old memories from lives already lived, filled with people already dead, remembered imperfectly, the way a man forgets the heartbreak of a girl, but remembers a certain June’s mid-day malaise where he woke up next to her with the red scarlet sky blushing dimly through sheer shades hung in the room of a house that has long been torn down. It reminds you, perhaps, in the way a certain petite madeleine does, with its scented taste born again on your tongue, of that time when before that heartbreak, and before that love, into the dawn of that summer’s day, the time where you had no choice but to fall in love.
Perhaps if we were able to revisit the past on our own terms instead, we would give the strongest rhetorical appeal we could, informed by the future. And yet even if we could live in the then with the insight of now, with fearful strength, with sorrow, with regret, we would deliver our speech, and transfigure fate itself—or perhaps, more likely, what was always meant to pass would pass us by once again, and then we would finally be robbed of our lone solace, our single salve, our crutch—that of the what if, the if only… we no longer could nurse the mystery of alternate timelines, having visited one, only to find out that the central strand of our fate remains unsheered, and we would have no choice but to understand the western wind, stormy weather, and Spanish boots of Spanish Leather.
Are you familiar with the synecdoche? It is a figure of speech, and to deeply simplify it, the use case for a synecdoche is to have a part resemble a whole—we commonly call this sort of thing a symbol nowadays in literary criticism. For example, in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, his madeleine biscuit is a synecdoche of his fundamental concerns with the nature of time’s relationship to the senses of the self. If you understand the madeleine’s significance in his book, you understand Proust—and according to Proust, if you understand his novel, you understand life. This is also what Charlie Kaufmann attempted with his Synecdoche, New York—his film centers around a playwright’s attempt to write the perfect play; and in the lifelong process of this attempt, his life falls to ruins around him, until, finally, at the end, with his head laid upon the actress who resembles a woman who is long gone, and who the actress herself doesn’t even resemble the playwright’s vision of the character she’s supposed to resemble, is there at the last moment, finally, to listen to the playwright’s matured vision. Just as he goes to speak it, the narrator of his life ends his life, and we’re left with an unresolved note that somehow calms us. And why is this? Because it itself is a synecdoche—the lack of resolution resembles our life. The irresolution is the resolution. What is unsatisfying satisfies us. The failure of his play succeeds in the film for us, the audience he doesn’t know. This also mirrors the end of Proust’s life, where he died alone with his masterpiece, the end of which spoke on how to claim life at last, written by the tired hands of a man who was fated to die along with the final word he would put to paper. This is a departure from musical synecdoche, but it will give us an idea of why, perhaps, musical form is so strangely ethereal, otherworldy, moving, emotional. Is it the case that in music life at last is there without burden or restraint—the heavens brought down to earth?
Have you ever wondered why talented musicians always seem to have—even if eccentric at times, or even if they’re an asshole—an air of inimitable coolness to them? I think this is due to their relationship with rhythm, which is another way of saying the movement of time; this is beyond the metronome, beyond the drums, beyond tempo. Something far more dynamic and which reaches beyond the confines of the musical venue. Perhaps you should sit down and truly think on the nature of the saying ‘march to the beat of your own drum.’
Now, the nature of the melody. Again, I will be diving into the shallows of this, so before a musicologist reads this blog and tweets at me well, akshually,—shut up, you fool. Music is not in your papers or in your head, it’s in your heart and body—and this is what mine tells me about the nature of music.
The melody is a kind of musical figure of speech—it’s a synecdoche for the entire song, in a way. More than that, not only is it a part of a song which represents the whole song—beginning here, going there, and coming back to here, but this time, colored by the tension introduced by going there—it also represents the nature of time itself. Consider the hero’s journey:
Now let’s pair this with a melody. Because it fits the theme of this article, and because it’s somewhat clear and easy for beginner ears to catch onto, I want you to listen to the lead singer in this song, especially as it concerns the first note he sings during the first verse (not the opening), (which he returns to again and again—this is called a root note), and the notes he sings where he departs from that first note (notice especially the lyrical content of what he says when he sings those higher notes):
The Angst:
‘Someday you'll realize,
I was the one’
The Sweet:
‘Then you'll be crying,
While I'm having fun’
Dion follows this vocal melody throughout the song. During moments where he sings about fear, angst, loneliness, he sings higher pitched, or to think of it in another way, he is singing in places far from where he begun—he is singing in foriegn lands, away from his roots. ‘I'll spend each lonely night/ Longing to hold you tight/ Morning finds me/ Crying to the sun’ But then, finally, he returns, and it makes the listener feel safe and sound again, like spring after winter, love after heartbreak, wealth after poverty, satisfaction after tension. ‘But I'll find somebody new/ And I'll get over you/ Then my broken heart/ Will hurt no more.’
Does this not resemble our hero’s journey? Does this not resemble life? Not only the lyrics here (which sit over the melody and gives it depth the way a curtain of light shadowing branches of leaves do, turning them from dark green to luminous gems), but the melody itself? Another song that does this wonderfully, by the ever masterful Brian Wilson, and that follows a similar structure, and is therefore a timeless classic, is Wouldn’t It Be Nice (notice how he plays with going away from root notes, when he returns to them, not only in terms of the melody, but also with the structure of the song itself—the parts in a dialogue with each other):
Therein lies the mystery of the melody, of rhythm—it plays with the beginning; the root note; the central thread of fate. What is so admirable about its departure, like the hero’s journey, is that it has the courage to depart, and then upon returning home, it does so changed, differentiated, and bestows a new kind of wealth to that original note. We can notice this for example during a conversation with strangers, where friendship emerges, perhaps, in the form of comedy—in courageous departure from the root note, and in return to it—in improv, this is known as the yes and. You affirm the central thread of the conversation, add to it, and open up the possibility to add to it, while returning upon the central thread again and again—this is known as the callback. Have you heard Norm Macdonald’s Moth Joke?
The entire joke is that he departs from the premise so thoroughly, so courageously, that he tricks the audience into forgetting the premise, the central thread, the root note, he opens up tension, he plays with it, modulates and scintillates on top of it, only to return to the root note at the end—he’s talking about a moth, a banal creature, which is incapable of the existential drama of the deviations that he explored. We laugh at him for his cleverness, yes, but moreso ourselves for forgetting that he was talking about the moth. But the laugh, the real laugh, not the nervous release of tension as he rambles, comes finally, only, at the punchline—the return to the root note!
Do you see now? The melody—it’s a synecdoche of time, in the way the madeleine is, in the way a good joke is, in the way the structure of a song itself it. Groovy… do you maybe understand now how jazz musicians jam out, how comedians riff, how singers write songs, how novelists write books, why lovers bring flowers on certain days? Let’s play with time, but not get lost in it—this is what it means to live well!
This perhaps is what presence is—and purity too. If central threads exist in songs, jokes, in love, in narrations of all kinds, then perhaps it lives in life as well. In fact, we know it does—if it didn’t, listening to songs from long ago, tasting biscuits for the first time in years, smelling a specific kind of coffee you once drank with a friend, or seeing a particular kind of red shade in the sky that you hadn’t seen since you were last in love, it’s as if life itself is peering into your soul—it’s speaking to you in symbols, it’s reminding you of time, which you fell asleep to, and that fatigue is where all your ills come from. Remember your moments of rage and spite—it was as if you were unthinking, intoxicated, asleep at the wheel. Did you forget that central thread in life—did you forget the premise, the root note, the beat of your own drum?
What would happen if you could live always with that root note in mind? How well could you riff on top of it? How persuasive would that be to those around you? Perhaps it would be mystifying, charming, provocative—perhaps it would give you an extra step in life.
Now, knowing that central thread, that root note, is completely different from remembering to think on it in your daily life. The mystery of what the central thread is might be more mysterious than the nature of what it is to follow it, and alter it. But perhaps, if you pay attention, it will reveal itself to you, if only you remember to look up, to witness the redness setting in the sky. Perhaps then you would remember to love when you had gotten so used to hate; to laugh after weeks of sorrow. Perhaps you would resurrect, be born again, like the Phoenix does, or other figures like it…
What would life look like then?
I have been haunted by this departure from the root note. I have thought of it in terms of absence, withdrawal, and longing. I could only describe it as harrowing. Why is this? Because unlike a song, we do not know when life ends. We exist in that departure, with our returns to that root note few and far between, for most of us… life is nothing but the tension and anxiety of not knowing when we can return home. This is felt gravely in certain moments—the death of a family member, whom you had waited too long to reach back out to; you’ll never be able to say the words you kept close to your lips, waiting for the right moment—that moment died with them. The girls you pushed away for whatever reason—their endless love now replaced by a cold indifference. Friends long gone, and moments shared with them. How does one survive such a thing? At the edges of departure, when the way home seems impossible, what makes the path back possible? Well, the answer is that you never really return home. Not truly. The note you played then was already played—it is dead, to never really return as it was. No, it is like words of love uttered for the first time, said to a girl you’ve just gotten to know, where you’re shivering like a ghost reaching out in the dark for a light, you’re not sure how she’ll respond. Will she run away or come closer for a kiss? Those words, if they come back as a kiss, don’t come back as the words, as what they were when first uttered—no, they could come back as a kiss! What magic. But you need to summon the courage to say the words—knowing they could run away, knowing they could come back as a kiss. You need this courage for as long as you live. Life is not a song—you don’t get to decide to stop saying it when you feel like it, unless you’re okay with being among the walking dead. Are you? Of course not. Wake up.
A promise broken: I said I would always hold onto them. I did something better, something unanticipated by the confines of the promise that was made. The watches—they no longer are worn on my wrist, instead they lay at the bottom of a long and wide river, where no man will reach them again. As I threw them into the sunlit waters, I knew that I was transforming them from objects, from talismans which held the energy of the person who gifted them, into metaphysical objects, where they swim now in my memory. Why did I do this? Because I have faith. In those deep waters, no man will reach them again, but in my memory, I reach them even now, yes, still, even now, and me alone—they’re my secret. I have faith. I have faith, like the singer departing from the central thread, I have faith that the watches will return again, in some form, in some way, in some time. I do not need the things themselves—I have their essence, and I always will. Not even the river can say that.