Music, Melody, and Songs

“The song, not the singer”
© MMII Rodney Rawlings

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Reconstruction on Ground Zero

You rise, unhindered, above the sagging roofs. You shoot your gracious tension to the stars, out of the slack, the tired, the accidental. The eyes one mile out on the ocean will see none of this and none of this will matter, but you will be the presence and the city.

—Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

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Introductory Remarks

These pages are about music, melody, and songs, and also the theory and appreciation of songs. The pages are being written linearly, so please pardon the absence of thoroughgoing integration in the discussion. I will fix anything I come to believe is too confusing.

My main concern is to look at the nature of music, with a way of thinking that might help the art and integrate it into a revolution that is coming: man’s rediscovery of rationality (for more on this see the works of Ayn Rand, who is quoted above). Since melody is music’s way of engaging the higher faculties of the mind, since it speaks to the pinnacle, the cutting edge, of our development, the discussion is driven by a struggle to explain the nature of melody’s rhetoric and appeal.

Song is a highly specialized use of melody, and yet the most common one. In my view it is the musical form that compresses as much of music’s power as possible into the shortest span of time. It does this by a special series of musical devices, many of which recur again and again in songs, and the most powerful of these is a certain usage of melody.

While lyrical considerations must always be borne in mind, the greatest songs are those of melodic virtuosity. I don’t mean cleverness; I mean rhetorical power, the expression of an art that has comprehended, however subconsciously, how melody works and how to put it in the service of expressing, not merely emotion, but that complexity of feeling that only man is capable of.

Those who find what follows interesting might want to see some random thoughts on these topics and related issues. Some of these ideas will be integrated into the theoretical discussion at one point.

Basic Theory

My thinking about the issues covered here proceeds from a more general theory of art that involves the following idea: that only successful works of art should be the object of study, because only in them can we observe the mechanics of it, art being intended to produce certain effects on the perceiver. If a work of art does not have a powerful artistic effect on us, there is no point in analyzing its devices, intentions, etc., except for historical or biographical interest relating to an artist who has created more successful works.

By “successful” I do not mean money-making or of mass popularity, but psychologically powerful, such that all the artistic devices in the work are handled with such skill (such art) that we, the audience, “lock onto” the work and are held rapt.

It is not enough that we can analyze a given work, say a poem, and pick out instances of simile, metaphor, sonnet form, metonymy, assonance, etc.; the mere use of such devices signals an attempt only, not a success. It is very easy to pack a poem full of these elements. Yet, too often, we see it implied that a poem’s greatness is to be found in the multiplicity and complexity of its use of such elements. In some cases we can read page after page of explication and examination of great writers’ works without encountering mention of the one thing that makes any of it relevant, the only thing that really matters to a poem’s stature: its effect, the nature of that effect, and how and whether the devices contribute to it.

It must be announced loud and clear that the technique of art is so complex, subtle, and sophisticated that the most reliable standard of artistic judgment is the human response. And I do not mean the response of any and every man, either: only of those who bring to the artistic experience a set of values that may be described as those that make us fully human.

To be human is to be able to reason; to be fully human is to hold reason as an unalterable and constant value. To the extent that a man lives this way, his response is indicative of a work’s value as art, and the main clue to it in our present level of knowledge.

The content and position of a work vis-à-vis reason, insofar as the work openly expresses it, is not the important contributor to such a man’s response. More important is the work’s satisfaction of a constant search for order, harmony, purification, stylization that is part of our nature. This quest may be present even in those who, consciously, oppose reason.

Man is ever on the hunt for intense experience, for ecstasy—the ideal on earth. In some, this is expressed in the field of morality. Many of those who judge people and events “in terms of black and white” are impelled mostly by a desire to live, as far as possible, in the pure, clean world they envision, by maintaining their dedication to it. The penchant that children exhibit for categorical judgments has the same motivation.

The quest for clear (“black and white”) awareness, in fact, underlies all human conscious endeavor. The scientific method sets up elaborate conditions to obtain the answer to a single question: yes or no? All the complex logical workings of a microprocessor are based on the one/zero dichotomy. A jury must weigh countless facts and probabilities to decide the life-or-death issue: Guilty or Not Guilty (that is, proven guilty or not)? We seek moral principles to sort out all the confusions and gray areas in our lives by the standard: good or evil?

What is at the root of some people’s opposition to black-and-white thinking but the basic premise that man is unable to know Truth and should be content with confusion amid life’s complexity?

Art satisfies our desire for purity, clarity, order. It gives us “the sense of living in a stylized universe” (Nathaniel Branden).

The representational forms of art (prose literature, sculpture, representational painting) are easier to analyze and relate to the appreciation of our reasoning mind, because they present objects and events to our sight, directly or indirectly. To an extent, we can anchor them to human life and trace the effect of this or that feature to our response. It is these forms of art that Ayn Rand mainly had in mind when she laid down her definition of art: “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments” (The Romantic Manifesto). We respond best to art that shows the world as we see it and validates our individual consciousness and the methods that we personally have worked out for forming our views.

But even these forms of art partake in no trivial way of features of the great non-representational forms, which are music, dance, and poetry. (Poetry is so highly musical that, for the purposes of the present discussion, it belongs here, not with the representational forms.) We have to explain the power and validity of these forms to fully explain the power and validity of the others.

It seems to be this: man being the rational animal that he is, he wants all components of his life to be expressed in some form of order, including emotions. If we feel heartbreak, we want to express it in song; it helps us to feel it fully and assimilate it.

Evidently, the exact ordering is not crucial—for example, we can have many songs (and many arrangements of any given song) expressing loneliness, and we can have many ways to choreograph joy. We simply need periodically to express our feelings in an ordered fashion.

But how to connect the devices by which this order is achieved—rhythm, color or sound harmony, proportion, etc., i.e. the nonrepresentational features of art—to emotions, and indeed to human life at all?

The only way to answer this, at our present level of scientific knowledge, is by resorting to introspection. We must ask: What goes on in us when we listen to music? (This would also explain the musical component of poetry and, to an extent, dance, both so intimately related to music.) Unavoidably, we must be sure that the music we apply this test to is actually giving rise to an artistic response in us, and one that is spontaneous. This is what I meant earlier about the study of successful works of art, as opposed to well-known ones.

It would seem that music induces emotion in us because it somehow speaks for us. In fact all art might be viewed as expression by proxy. The artist has found means of saying what we would say, if we had the skill. So the need for self-expression underlies the need for music. (Of what value is self-expression? Psychology teaches us the harmful consequences of repression, whether or not the repressed emotion is an appropriate response to our situation.)

Therefore we must ask how our selves are expressed by the use of music’s artistic devices generally. Most of us, of course, are non-artistic.

Let me draw some parallels between literature, painting, and music to throw light on this. In all of these, we can see self-expression going on. Literature takes the raw material of events, orders them into a story structure (along with using many other devices), and “makes a point,” whether it be a moral, a philosophy, or simply a good story affirming mutually agreed upon viewpoints. Painting takes as its raw material sights, orders them into a good composition, highlights certain things, etc., and “makes a point” about what the artist thinks worthy of contemplation.

What in music corresponds to this? Music obviously takes sounds as its raw material, but how can its ordering by pitch relationships, rhythm, etc. “make a point” the artist wants us to identify with? The answer, in my view, is that sounds have a special status in our life, different from smells and textures, for example. Sounds are one of the basic ways we express and communicate emotions. We laugh, cry, shout, sigh, etc. This being the case, sounds can be ordered like events and sights to “make a point” about what we think worthy of contemplation.

And since emotions might be regarded as action tendencies—impulses to action—human motion divorced from any purpose but emotional expression can become an art: the dance. We can envision a continuum from emotion to expressive motion, and here is the basis for the fact that dance requires music.

So the link to reality is not that sounds exist out there (because so do smells and textures), but that sounds mean something to us in the way that events and sights do. All three can be manipulated to make a statement about the world.

The devices of literature are derived from the rhetoric of “moralizing” storytelling. The devices of painting are derived from the rhetoric of “showing” and “illustrating.” The devices of music/dance are derived from the rhetoric of the sound/motion language of emotion/motion.

Artistic devices are a technology, capable of infinite development but not arbitrary and valid for all artists in the field.

As Ayn Rand said in a famous formulation, “Art is the technology of the soul.”

We can see more clearly how the moral point made by a novel, or the visual depiction of the world in a painting, is of value to man, than we can see the value of venting emotion through music. Of course, we have mentioned that emotional release is important in that by doing so we avoid repression. But there is much more to it than that. We must remember that none of these purposes can be fulfilled in isolation: as in argumentation, your major point must be made by making a number of sub-points that support the main one. Thus, a novel or painting (merely by telling a story or showing a scene) necessarily presents by implication an entire world-view and view of man, and the pleasure of contemplating these arts is the experience of living in that total world for a while. That world is evoked not only by what is said or shown about the world directly or indirectly, but also by what is implied about the human mind in the choice of artistic devices by the artist.

It is the same in music. The value of the emotional release is tied up with our appreciation of all the artistic devices used. We say to ourselves, when we enjoy a piece of music, “This is how my mind works; this is how I process my feelings.”

Moreover, though we live in an inner, emotional world when we listen to music, that world has strong outer-world connotations and references. Because we do not experience emotions except in relation to the world, the representation of feelings in sound must include on an equal footing some aural representation of the things outside us: motions, textures, sequences, intensities, etc.—or even recognizable sounds. Music can do this because echoing and imitation are already part of the rhetoric of emotion/motion.

(Here I am thinking mainly of the use of tone color and special effects in music. But not all of these are meant to refer to objects outside us in the above sense. The tone colors of the standard orchestra, in my opinion, have inherent emotional meanings. For example, the tone of the oboe has been described as “fragile,” and in my view this is not an arbitrary or learned association; it is based on the physical manifestations of this quality within and without our bodies. This is true of all the instruments, and it will be true of all the new tone colors made possible by computer technology.)

The musical universe, while we are experiencing it, can only be adequately described as a parallel world, one entirely made up of the interface between mind and body that is expressed by motions, intensities, sounds.

The Nature of the Ordering That We Seek in Music

The ordering of experience that we look for in music cannot be arbitrary. It must be based on what we find in the sounds themselves. But pitch relations, for example, exist in all sounds. Therefore, it is not the fact that certain relationships exist between elements of the sound experience that makes it artistic. It is how those relationships are manipulated to gain the artistic effect.

In sound, we perceive units (repetition), regularity, and mathematical relations of pitch. But it is not enough therefore to embody rhythm, melody, harmony, etc. in sounds. This would leave “music” virtually without content. This, I think, is exactly the problem with so much “intellectual” music of the past and present that is so uninteresting. You can point out exhaustively all the elements and interrelations a composer has incorporated into his work, but this is no indication of its value. It is rather easy to extract such data from any work, no matter how poor.

Is the problem that such music is too simple, that regular rhythms must be disrupted and somehow come out perfect in the end? That melody has to offer some challenge to the perceiver? Yes, that is definitely the core of it. But it must be complexity of the right kind! It must be complexity in use of the ways we react to music, psychological virtuosity if you will—genius of knowing how we process musical phenomena and of being supremely skilled in benevolently “messing with our minds.”

Yet, you say, many great, moving pieces have quite-regular rhythms, plain harmony, and simple melody—where is their complexity? And I say that such a piece could not be great or moving (unless as an affirmation of someone’s mental lethargy). But one must be careful—now we have melody in the picture, and melody does not wear its complexity on its sleeve as rhythm and harmony do.

Theory Pages Continue Under “Melody”


Favorite Pieces of Popular Music
(Perpetually Under Construction)

It took me a few years to regress to the point where I could play and sing rock ’n’ roll. But now I really love it—honest, I really do. I think that’s because it’s gotten better.

Listen to the early rock ’n’ roll records. They sound very thin. The singers were poor, the musicianship was poor and generally the songs were poor. But the ones that are coming out today are of much better quality.

—Nino Tempo, in Song Hits Magazine, August 1964

I agree with the above observations on early (and much of the later) rock and roll. Most of it was and is boring—as witness, the countless doo-wop records that all sound basically the same. But R&R brought a great many new elements to popular music that became integrated into the best of the music that had come before, and a new style of songwriting was born. In this, the song was written with the new beat and rhythms in mind, and even a particular arrangement, from the start, so that while the song might not hold up on its own, it was essential to the fantastic listening experience that was the record.

Accordingly, note that the listing below of my favorites is not one of songs but of records. I love many records that nevertheless are not examples of great or even good songs as pure songs.

My idea of exactly what constitutes a good song will appear in these pages. As the reader may guess, good melody-writing is an essential component. But melody is not the whole of music, and what these recordings have in common is good treatment of the musical ideas used, such as they are, and the fact that they express something that I find very appealing on a deep level. The melodies are frequently very good indeed, since I have always been sensitive to that aspect; but for some of these records, all one can say is that the melody is perfectly appropriate to the intentions of the record.

While most of my preferences proceed from values I have held since childhood, some of them stem from values acquired later and from my present thinking about music, melody, and songs. I have found that records I was indifferent to or even hated when they were released, I now like.

The reader will also note that not many recent recordings appear in the list. This is because the feelings expressed by most of today’s records are alien to mine. Most importantly of all, melody—good melody—seems not be pursued as a goal. Tunes now are very clichéd and trite—they sound like the composer was satisfied with the first thing that came out of his head, or was trying to copy something that was not too good to begin with. (Notice how many times you hear songs imitating the repeated-note phrase in Burt Bacharach’s “Arthur’s Theme,” one of that excellent songwriter’s lesser efforts.) So-so tunes might be OK, but also there is not much “that I find very appealing on a deep level,” either.

Let me mention a record from the 70s called “What Does It Take to Win Your Love” by Junior Walker and the All Stars. The point here is not melody in my sense—and I don’t care. The same comments apply to Swing Out Sister’s “Am I the Same Girl.” (Who are these unsung geniuses that arrange popular recordings? I don’t exaggerate when I say that I would be just as proud to have our species’ achievements represented to extraterrestrial intelligences by these two records as to have it represented by a Mozart recording.)

And while I do not as a rule like Whitney Houston’s sort of song, or her sort of style, despite her greatness as a singer, I do like “I’m Saving All My Love for You” as a song; and “The Greatest Love of All” could hardly be disliked by me, an Objectivist, due to the facts that (1) it is quite a passable melody and (2) the “greatest love,” in the song, turns out to be love of self.

My brother Keith, who has a home page on puppetry and its origins, shares many enthusiasms with me when it comes to popular music, and some readers may wish to look at a few (sometimes-silly) letters we have exchanged on various subjects of interest to both of us, or, sometimes, one of us.

Finally, in this list I give the recording artist rather than the composer because of the nature of this listing; however, in the case of the good songs in this list, I regard the composer as being responsible for two-thirds of the success of the record.

Here they are. (Note: The fact that a record lacks a link here means only I haven’t gotten around to writing a lengthy comment. It does not indicate relative worth by any means. Nor does the order mean anything most of the time. But let’s start off really strong with the first couple of items at least.)

Personal and Contact Information

I am a composer and songwriter, and also a freelance book editor/writer. My tone poem for concert band Anthem was publicly performed at Laidlaw Hall, Upper Canada College. The score is available here.

Often, I put words to my music, whether or not the piece is intended to be a song, because—in accordance with my belief in the importance of melody—my tunes are usually song-like. A few of my lyrics are offered for the curious.

I have also written a musical called The Watcher on the Shore. Of course, it is influenced by Ayn Rand’s philosophy, my sympathy with which is obvious in these pages; nevertheless, the play is the vehicle of my personal vision.

To see a song from The Watcher on the Shore, please go here. And here is my paean to Halley’s Comet.

Maintained by: Rodney Rawlings