Harmony and History

By ROGER SCRUTON

The millennium interests us because it reminds us of what is distinctive about Western civilization: its restless urge to build on the past, to appropriate the future, and to aspire to what is new. This urge is nowhere more finely exemplified than by our music. Western music has been a voyage of discovery, which also provides a matchless record of what we were and are.

The Christian churches inherited from late antiquity a body of unison chant - ever-flowing, tranquil melodies that express the condition of a community at rest with its God. But neither the churches nor those who sang in them were content with this. Once past the first millenium, the musical language began to evolve, to become complex, to convey the new awareness that life does not follow an unchanging course but boils up and overflows, moves differently at different levels, contains crosscurrents and whirlpools, conflicts and resolutions.

Harmonic Accompaniments

Melodies acquired harmonic accompaniments, which adhered to them and also defied them. At first the harmony moved simply -in parallel fourths, or in stepwise motion, resting on the fourth, the fifth and the octave. Harmony led to counterpoint, in which melodies sound together at different pitches, starting and ending at different times. The simplest case of counterpoint is the canon, known to almost everyone, from "Frère Jacques" and "Row, Row, Row Your Boat", in which a melody is accompanied by itself, starting a bar or two later.

One of the earliest, and still among the most brilliant of popular canons, is the 13th-century "Sumer is icomen in," which takes six voices through many of the harmonies later to become familiar to Western ears, and which returns constantly to the "common chord", the three-note harmony that combines major third and minor third within the compass of a fifth. Thereafter the common chord became the cornerstone of Western harmony.

Hand-in-hand with the common chord came the diatonic scale: the do-re-ni-fa etc. that was taught to schoolchildren as the essence of music. Before the triumph of this scale, music had been organized around the "modes" inherited from antiquity, which were resistant to harmonic organization, and which depended for their serene and evocative message on the fact that they favored the unison. This marked preference for the unison is still evident in the modal music of the Arabs and in the Indian ragas.

The diatonic scale imposes a new kind of invention, in which melodic and harmonic thinking are synthesized. Each note of the musical line must make melodic sense, but it must also form part of a harmonic sequence. The simultaneous constraint of harmony and melody explains the distinctive character of Western music, and its inherent tendency to evolve both technically and emotionally. Each diatonic scale defines a key. The Western ear is now thoroughly accustomed to relations of keys. Music that modulates from one key to another does not sound strange to us. On the contrary, modulation is a source of delight.

The late middle ages and early Renaissance were the periods of polyphony, in which both melody and harmony emerged from the simultaneous sounding of several voices, each making melodic sense in itself. The high point of polyphony was reached in the Counter-Reformation, and in particular in the sublime four, five and six-part liturgical settings of Palestrina, Byrd and Victoria. In this music a new feature emerges into the foreground -the suspension, in which notes are held while others change, creating a dissonance, which is then resolved to a concord. This effect, peculiar to the Western tradition, is responsible for much that is most moving and elevating in the music that we know. The practice of suspension survives through the classical and romantic periods, to be given new life by the modernists.

In all polyphonic writing, however well balanced, the highest and the lowest voices tend to stand out, the one delivering melody, the other its harmonic ground. We are so familiar with this phenomenon from jazz and popular music that we hardly notice it, except every now and then, as when we listen to the magical effect of the bass line in a Schubert song. But the relation between melody and bass introduces a new potential for musical expression. Melody becomes a dramatic vehicle, with a bass that subliminally emphasizes its movement through harmonic space, while relinquishing all independent claim on our emotions. Thus was born the "art song", the highest instance being opera, which very quickly established its following with the Orfeo of Monteverdi.

All those developments depended on another, and equally important, innovation: the development of a precise musical notation. Like so much that marks our civilization, exact notation arose from a collective endeavor. Once in place, notation permitted new varieties of experiment and new complexities of form. Music was emancipated from the tradition of performance and entered the world of ideas. Like the written word, it became abstract, self referential, playing with itself and with its own internal relations, as in the fugues of Bach.

Here is the most remarkable fact about our music, one that has never been sufficiently commented upon: A musical person, familiar with the outline of our tradition, can at once assign a date to almost any piece of our music, however unfamiliar. Western music is through and through historical, in just the peculiar way that Western civilization is historical: We hear history in it, and even if it is only a delicate nuance of style that distinguishes the language of Mendelssohn from that of Schubert, you know at once that the "Hebrides" overture was written a few years later than the Unfinished Symphony. In such experiences you perceive, through the ear, something of the spiritual development of a civilization and the unique place of the individual within it.

This historical process is the subject of much scholarly comment and controversy. After the great glories of Bach and Handel, it is often said, Western music embarked on a new path, in which harmony was separated from melody, and the chord took on a life of its own, independent of the voices that compose it. To some extent this is true. Yet there is no greater triumph of polyphony than the last movement of Mozart's "Jupiter" symphony. And in the great romantics, polyphony re-emerges as the dominant organizing force. Study any symphony of Brahms, or the later operas of Wagner, and you will find that chords and chord relations are given enormous importance. But hardly any instrument of the orchestra is not following a musical line as expressive as the leading melody.

The historical experience enshrined in Western music has continued into our century. Schoenberg called for new kinds of musical organization, believing the old language of "tonality" had exhausted its expressive potential. For a while the musical world believed him, but tonality has slowly reasserted its hold on the Western imagination, incorporating the legacy of Schoenberg and his contemporaries, but also transcending it. And the experience of recent history is as clearly encapsulated in the new music as it was in the old. Listening to Berg's Violin Concerto, for example, we know at once its place in the history of Western art. We know that it belongs to another and vanished world, the world of central Europe in the throes of self-destruction. And we hear the sublime way in which the music rises above the tragedy and reconciles us to it. Western music is not merely music with a history, but music in which history is recorded, transfigured and redeemed.

Will this great tradition survive the millenium? The classical language, of music arose from practices, such as singing, dancing and playing, which have begun to atrophy. Instead of singing, today's young people merely "sing along" with pop songs; instead of dancing, they throw themselves about in a sexual display; instead of playing an instrument, they turn on the stereo.

Sound of Silence

The old culture of listening depended on something else that is no longer easily obtainable: silence. Modern people are afraid of silence, and they try to fill it with noise. A new kind of music has therefore emerged, designed not for listening but for hearing; music whose principal device is repetition, which employs only pre-digested harmonies and fragmented tunes, and which relies on a monotonous "back beat" to propel it into the ear and the soul of those who overhear it. People brought up on such music lose the feel for polyphony; their musical attention span shortens to atrophy; and they grasp musical organization only by moving to a beat.

We owe it to young people to turn off the noise. We must re-create silence, so that silence can turn to song. If we do not do this, then our musical culture will die. It is not we, but our children, who will be the losers.