The Missing Song

[The] feeling, power, originality, and beauty of folksong being a salvation in unmelodic times.
—Max Bruch

I think I’ve got it. By George, I think I’ve got it. The problem with modern scores, especially those by earnest younger hopefuls who have jettisoned the lockjawed cerebralism of their elders in favor of a more ingratiating, even welcoming style. While I might find listening to such works far less of an ordeal than the blippity-bloop-fests of yesteryear, nonetheless I’m unmoved, uninterested, and just plain uninvolved. Typically I hear elaborate orchestration, all manner of nifty sound effects, but not much else. This lamentable tendency to write amorphous blobs of sound out of which various dings and ditters arise, these eruptions into movie-soundtrack bling and blam, the umpty-million orchestral instruments not really doing all that much of anything, the faux-electronica matched sometimes by adding in the real thing: What a bore, what a gawdawful bore it all is.

So what, in a nutshell, is really wrong with all the stuff? Surely it’s a massive improvement on the hopeless academic folderol of yore. I should be grateful, and to some extent I am. At least I’m not sitting there cringing. But nor am I sitting there enchanted and entranced and engaged and intrigued. Mostly, I’m bored.

I come back to Max Bruch’s quote above, which sprang into mind as I was listening to his Scottish Fantasy, a piece that more or less vanished from the repertory for sixty years after its premiere until Jascha Heifetz’s immense prestige revived it from its near-coma. I wouldn’t for one minute confuse Max Bruch with a major composer, but he wasn’t some addlepated piker either; his venue was more Mendelssohnian than Wagnerian, his tastes more in line with the Classical than the late Romantic. Old Max believed in melodies, enticingly harmonized and fragrantly orchestrated, and in good solid structures that carried listeners along clearly-defined and well-engineered paths. And what a joy the Scottish Fantasy is! Attractive, engaging, enjoyable, sometimes downright heart tugging. No immortal masterpiece, to be sure, but a thoroughly well-made composition that satisfies to an extent that seems all but extinct amongst today’s writers. Listening to the Scottish Fantasy is like having superbly well-executed dinner at a fine restaurant; one leaves happy, satisfied, maybe even just a bit dazzled by sensory input. Listening to today’s modernist pieces is like eating at a garish Las Vegas buffet, all bling and lights flashing and glitzy presentation, but charmless, mediocre food right out of a neighborhood Applebee’s.

I’ve heard young composers point to a two-note motive in their works and call it a melody. No, kid. That’s not a melody. Maybe it’s an idea you’re going to work with—and more power to you. Bach constructed the Kyrie of the B Minor Mass out of an appoggiatura figure, after all. But it’s not a melody. Bach used his appoggiatura to create the soaring fugue subject that threads through that glorious Kyrie, measure for measure, line for line. He didn’t write some murmuring instrumental mash and then place a few soloists above it playing the occasional appoggiatura, all with appropriately different sounds, of course. But that’s what so many of these folks seem to think of as melodic development.

My question—actually, my plea—is: why must modern music stray so far from simple human responses? People have been humming tunes to themselves, or singing them in groups, for as long as people have been around. We’re a tune-humming species. We have been singing lullabies, drinking songs, hunting songs, festival songs, dancing songs, stretching back to our evolutionary ancestors in all likelihood. Homo erectus just might have tapped his toes and danced to a nice tune on a bone flute.

The 20th century was the first time, at least as far as I can ascertain, that a significant group of composers abandoned the basics of recognizable melody, rhythm, and harmony. In doing so, they jettisoned a thousand years of experience, hearing, and observation. We still train our students in those skills; we still teach them harmony and counterpoint, to recognize neighbor-tone figures and appoggiaturas and passing tones and chordal skips and all the rest. We still ding them for failing to resolve the 7th of a seventh chord or playing fast and loose with cross-relations. In short, we train them to respect humanity’s musical legacy. But then the composers come along and write music that treats all that as though it’s trivial and unimportant.

I have a simple challenge to any of today’s younger composers. Write a Scottish Fantasy of your own. Not some cynical post-modern take on the original, not some squally thing full of weird sounds, but a real Scottish Fantasy: base it on Scottish folk tunes and don’t rape the poor ditties in the interest of modernity. Just use them. Harmonize them well, orchestrate them using a standard 19th-century concerto orchestra, structure the thing in clear sonata-form, three-part aria, and rondo forms. Then make it work. Make it something people want to hear, people want to play.

But you can’t, can you? Not because there’s anything social or professional holding you back, except that you can’t. You don’t have the technique, the skill. You can’t measure up to the abilities of a Max Bruch, a good-but-not-spectacular composer in an era of authentic, actual giants. That’s what it really gets down to: just as American education has gone sliding down the chute to the point where American kids are being outperformed academically by their counterparts in Botswana, ditto serious American composition. Our young composers are all Las Vegas buffet chefs, all bling and presentation tarting up assembly-line fare. Maybe it’s time to get them back into the classroom, and back to a work table: write fugues—real tonal fugues—and learn to handle the larger homophonic forms as other than convenient templates in which to pour in uninspired ideas. Acquire some real technique. Become real chefs.

But above all, learn to sing. Melody is the soul of all music. Lose melody and you lose the whole.

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