The Making of Melodies and Tunes

by Professor Frederick Corder

A witty French philosopher has said that you may be sure that every popular belief is wrong, because it has satisfied the unintelligent majority. Certainly the popular ideas of "musical inspiration" and "the gift of melody" are cases in point, for the belief in these is all but universal, although nothing is easier than to prove their falsity. The fleeting nature of musical sounds prevent the immature intelligence from perceiving that what is true of pictorial verbal art must be equally true of musical art, that if you go back to the beginning of music (which very few do) you find clumsy and crude attempts, which improved with practice and experience, and finally, that it was only natural that melody should be evolved to its fullest glory while yet harmony was in its earliest infancy. These considerations cannot be grasped, I know, by those to whom the word evolution has no meaning—to whom every musical experience is a separate event, unconnected with all others. To such persons it would not seem impossible that a human being brought up alone in a desert island should be capable of producing a poem a painting or a pianoforte prelude. The musician knows that everything that he invents (or thinks that he invents) has a direct and traceable ancestry. Knowing that indisputable fact he yet professes to believe in inspiration, just as all people profess to believe in "luck," though with the vaguest ideas of what they mean by the word. If you really tackle one of these loose-thinking gentry he will say something to this effect:

"I don't deny that musical ideas can be invented— ideas of a sort; but the really vital ideas-those that live—come unprompted and spontaneous, and are of quite a different quality from the manufactured article —just as composers themselves are." If you take every statement in this speech and disprove it entirely it is breath wasted. You can show how all Beethoven's ideas were evolved, hammered and chiselled out of inferior material and revised and rewritten till they became splendid; you can show how Wagner's Prize-song was deliberately invented to be a counterpoint to the old master singer's theme; you can point to Gounod's Avc Maria as a manufactured tune better than any so-called spontaneous production; and, of course, you can instance just as many musicians whose powers developed with painful slowness, as you can those who seemed to require no assistance. Your baffled inspira-tionist will then dart off at a tangent and declare that True Melody is only to be found in the Folk Song, which everyone admits, he says, to be a perfectly spontaneous product. This is tantamount to asserting that Mr. Nobody is a greater genius than Mr. Somebody, an absurd argument. As a matter of fact all tunes, whether the author be known or not, have appeared in countless variants; and the only generalization you can make, upon a really extensive acquaintance with them, is that the later the version the better the tune. This brings us to the point we have to consider.

What is Melody?

It is curious how difficult the writers of theory books find it to give a definition of this term. They mostly rest content with saying "Notes in succession" or "Notes in well-ordered succession," which conveys no idea to us. The answer is "A rhythmical succession of sounds." Without rhythm (i. e. pattern) this "succession of notes" is pointless, and the more definite the rhythmic pattern, the more striking is the melody. Melody corresponding to a simple quatrain of verse, having symmetrical accents and phrases, is called a Tune, and is the only kind of music that is complete in itself, provided the end cadence is a Tonic one. Outside this, just as with poetry, there is every variety of irregular stanza—every degree of less definite rhythmic melody, so that at no other stage can you say that an assortment of phrases is a melody, or merely "melodious." I think it is best to keep the term "Tune" for the melody that is as symmetrical as a brick, and the term "Melody" for the less definite kinds—indeed most people instinctively adopt this classification.

Accent in Melody

As regards the accent of music we all know without telling that this must either consist of a stress and a non-stress or a stress and two non-stresses, just as in verse we must have a long and a short foot, or a long and two short feet. Useless to bore us with the Greek terms—to complicate this simple fact by distinguishing between Tambus and Trochee, or between Dactyl, Amphibrach and Anapoest. All that we need to know is which note bears the accent—all that we need to feel is that that accent or pulse must occur like the tick of a pendulum, whether there be one or two non-accents before or after it. One need hardly point out that where the music is quick we measure the accent off with a coarser rule, thus:

Accents in melody

Much confusion is caused to the learner of music by there being no constant unit for the measurement of time, the tick of the pendulum being sometimes represented by a whole note or semibreve, and sometimes, by the sixteenth part of this, or semiquaver. But this cannot altogether be avoided, owing to the non-uniformity of speed, which necessitates the shifting of the standard of measurement. The first thing to remember about melody is that though the skeleton of it—the recurring accent—must be regular, we instinctively desire to conceal this by making the subdivision irregular. This irregular subdivision is what we mean by the term rhythm. The most primitive form of tune is a hymn-tune. In this the utmost simplicity is desirable and hardly any artistic embellishment is felt to be in good taste; consequently there is no variety of rhythm, the tune merely follows the accents of the words. But in secular tunes few will be found, even in earliest times, in which variety of pattern is not attempted. Tunes which were of too bald a character at first were soon unconsciously altered and varied, thus:

Variation of a melody

All popular tunes, especially those called Folk-tunes (because their composer is ignored) have undergone this trimming or embellishment, sometimes beginning as hymn tunes and turning into graceful airs or the reverse. God Save the King has been so knocked about by different hands and exists in so many shapes that all inquiry into its actual origin is baffled. It would seem to have been only developed from a conventional Saraband, an old dance, of which hundreds exist. So when you come down to the bedrock of things you find that we do not invent, we only rearrange. Where invention comes in is at the other end. Out of the well-worn and simple rhythmic, melodic and harmonic material the man of culture and imagination will always be able to astonish the world by producing new effects. Just as Charles Dickens could enchant all hearts and minds in a long series of books with hardly a novel plot or incident, so can Puccini make the dry bones of Italian opera live and seem new, so has Elgar done with Oratorio and so will the men of real insight be able to do till the end of time.

I have defined a tune as corresponding to a quatrain of verse. Two points here immediately arise: 1. There are such things as stanzas of 3, 5, or even 6 lines in verse. Is it the same with tunes? Yes, such expansions or contractions of the normal form can occur in music, as in poetry, why not? But 4 lines is the normal, just as duple time is felt to be more normal than triple, the ground-cause being that our heart has two valves and our limbs are all in pairs. 2. The correspondence of verse and music would seem to indicate that the tune and the poetic quatrain must have come into existence together, or at least that the former owed its invention to the latter. History corroborates this. The melody of the early troubadours and music allied to unrhymed verse was almost of necessity shapeless. In the dance there must always perforce have been regularity of accent and an ever-increasing tendency towards the eight-bar period, but in the earliest dances that we can find written down there are sometimes odd departures from the normal, clumsy strains of 7 or 9 measures occurring occasionally, and in the courante, or Coranto, as we find it used by Bach and others, the dance is in slow triple time, but the last bar in duple, which sounds wrong. Still, this may be a whim of the composers, like when they turned a jig into a fugue; the actual dance may not have had this feature: one cannot tell.

When the Amateur Writes a Tune

When the amateur of to-day writes a tune it is so symmetrical that it suggests the product of a machine, which is pretty much what it really is. The first phrase being given to twenty young composers, the other three phases would probably be furnished with scarcely any difference by any of them; if the first half of the tune were given I should expect to find no difference at all. But this is the best preliminary exercise in composition: given th.e first half of a tune, to make the obvious second half. There are now numerous books which give such exercises, but I believ.e that I was the first person to publish one. The next stage would be to furnish a continuation to the given fragment making a cadence in some related key, e. g.:

First and second half of a melody

This would make the given portion become a quarter of the tune instead of half; and now what should we have for the second half? We could have the opening phrase a third time, but this would be dull. Our third phrase would want to be quite new and our fourth could be anything, provided it came back and made a tonic cadence. So you see that far from every tune being an inspiration it has to have a definite, logical shape and this shap.e cannot vary much, any more than can the shape of a quatrain of verse. A tune will have two phrases, as the quatrain has two rhymes, and these can hardly be disposed in any other order than (1) a, b, a, b; (2) a, b, b, a, or (3) a, a, a, b. Th,e third of these would introduce us to the idea of Sequence in a tune. The popular air, Marlbrook or We Won't Go Home 'Till Morning, is a typical example. This shape of tune is common in dance music, where invention is rather shunned than sought, e. g.:

Sequence in a melody

a well-known Polka, of which I need hardly quote the remainder, it is so trite. It is obvious that by making our end-cadence not a tonic one we can join one tune to another, or one section of tune to another and so make a musical piece of considerable length. Schumann does this; it was his usual method of writing, but it must be owned that it is not a very satisfactory procedure. It prevents continuity of thought and makes the piece seem like a collection of short poems rather than one long one. Is there not a better way?

If we make the separate phrases of a tune not match so precisely as they do in a folk-song, such as Home, Sweet Home! we get at once a superior kind of thing but it at once ceases to be a tune in the old sense. Take Gounod's Salve, dimora:

Salve, dimora by Gounod

Here is our quatrain, right enough, but the 3d and 4th lines instead of being the mere consequence of the first two show a fresh impulse of invention, which is maintained through the continuation and enhanced by a beautiful counter-melody for a solo violin. The musical mind needs no training to enable it to construct a square tune, but though it may admire a more extended melody, such as the above, it cannot possibly produce or understand how to set about producing one until after considerable musical education. Can anybody tell me who wrote the once popular melody of Dixie Land? Its singular rhythmical variety makes me suspect that the words were written to the music (as they certainly were in the English adaptation In the Strand) but it is an unique instance of what may be called "extended tune-form" without any repetition. This could never have been made by an untutored negro, though Old Uncle Ned and Why Did My Master Sell Me? could be, and perhaps were.

Tunes the Result of Variations

All tunes, then, have been evolved by variation from the simple accents of stress and on.e or two non-stresses. The variations have been generally influenced by the accent of the words to which the tunes were fitted and these, of course, differ in the various languages. Most English dissyllables have the stress on the first syllable, most French dissyllables have it on the last. Most German and Italian verbs end with a short syllable; most English ones with a long one and Hungarian has accents like no other language. These peculiarities must be reflected in the shape of the tunes. Scotch and Irish folk-songs find their tunes much influenced by the scale of the bagpipe, Welsh ones by the harp, and Swiss ones by the mountain horn on which the "composers" have evolved their phrases.

This is aptly illustrated by the following four tunes, which are not so much local variants of the same tune as local evolutions from the same harmonic species, that simple alternation of Tonic and Dominant harmony which has been the basis of most musical ideas, and always will be.

Folks songs

Embellished versions of all these are very numerous, and it is curious to observe how, in some places, a tune has been quite pleasingly elaborated and then has been (presumably by a duller set of minds) made to revert to a balder form, just as has been the case with folktales and ballads.

Poetry and music are subject to the same influence-that of the popular imagination, or the lack of it. Given the words, which are often mere doggerel, a tune begins by following them slavishly. If it is a good tune it catches on, gets modified to fit other words, maltreated to form a dance or even a hymn! Its best phrase gets annexed by a (frequently unconscious) robber or a plagiarist, and turns up thereafter in the most unexpected situation. How surprised would Beethoven have been to know that his famous tune in the Finale of the Ninth Symphony, which took him half his life to write, was practicallv identical with a troubadour song of the early thirteenth century!

Troubador song

The first fitting together of the component phrases of a tune is so simple a process that it can be achieved by anyone possessing the most elementary form of musicality, and, indeed, achieved better by him or her than by a more educated musician, who would be apt to get an inferior result in the desire of avoiding what has been done ten thousand times before. Publishers know this, and when they want ballads or simple pieces adapted to the comprehension of the great uncultured public for and by which they live they go to the amateur rather than to the instructed composer; to the latter is given the humiliating task of correcting the spelling and bad grammar of his successful rival.

"Jerry Building"

The superior ability of the unsophisticated in the "jerry building" of tunes is also felt by the public; friends always warn the amateur: "If you learn harmony you will lose your gift (!) of melody." And this is perfectly true. When the musician learns the larger delights which his art has to offer he no longer has the inclination—he loses actually the power—to indulge in mere brickmaking. He finds that cadences are the cheapest goods in the market, and he instinctively breaks the corners of all his bricks—thinks of his harmony in gliding inversions instead of bumping root-positions; learns presently to think of his bass as a melody instead of as a series of supports to the structure, and finally gets to think of melody, such as that of Mackenzie's Benedictus or Wagner's Prise Song, as the model to fix his aims upon—sometimes, it is true, forgetting that the greater should contain the less, and that no man is fit to write a Tone Poem or an Impressionistic Mood Picture (whatever that may be) if he cannot also write a tune.

I know full well it is quite hopeless to reason people out of any belief by exposing its falsity Belief is independent of human reason, the history of many a religious movement shows us that. . If anyone does me the honor to read this article and comprehend the argument it is ten to one he will say, "This man doesn't believe in melody being a gift. Well / do!" And he will consider the controversy ended. Allow me to point out that all people calt a picture a "creation of the artist" and ignore the ten thousand calculated brush-strokes which brought about the perfect result after perhaps several abortive efforts. That a beautiful female costume is commonly called "a creation," though it has been modified a score of times and required several different hands and minds to accomplish. Still more absurd, that we all think of a man—especially a pronounced individuality—as having been directly created as we know him, instead of having attained to this state from childhood through gradual stages. So we think of the child, and forget that it was erstwhile a repulsive infant, and we think of "dear baby" as "a gift," as the newspapers prettily put it, and ignore his earlier stage.

The unthinking mind dislikes admitting that every effect must have a cause. It is much prettier to think of tunes having been dropped from heaven into any silly mind that would like to have them, than to admit tho truth—that we have just imitated other people, as we do all the time; so of course we cherish the idea that music is a gift. After all, it is a harmless belief—except for the person who is trying to learn it.