Comments on: Describing melodies II: What people like

by: Valkyrie

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 17:34:08 +0000

Hmmm . ..

It’s very simple for me. I like a surprise. That’s the kind of melodic “hook” that gets to me.

In the song “Poses”, you have this straightforward little song, nothing special at first, and then it suddenly falls off from a nice polite major key into a darker tinged tune with the hint of a minor note. It gets me every time I listen to it.

The song “Peach Trees” was a tune that I had a hard time bonding with at first, it was so unusual, so “all over the place”. Quickly it became one of my favorites, though. It’s hooks are not so much the wandering melody and harmonies, but the changes in the song’s ambience. I think that “Memphis Skyline” resembles “Peach Trees” in a similar way, a wandering song that changes its feelings totally at some point.

Not your usual melodic “hook”, maybe something new and different.

by: jan2

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 08:47:17 +0000

I was rather amazed to see on the Sequenza blog this continuing resistance to melody, alongside a somewhat precious high-modern defense of contemporary classical music. Did these guys never really understand postmodernism at all? (They seem to think Zorn is ok - he qualifies as ‘high culture’ in some way I guess) I am sure you are right that Rufus Wainwright songs tend to be ‘organic’ in their development of melodies. But some of them also seem, to someone musically uneducated like me, to be quite complex in terms of the melodies themselves, which develop over a rather long time for a ‘pop’ song, and tend to have 2 or 3 rather than just one themes within them (this seems easiest to hear on the earlier albums).

I’ve been listening to another ‘pop’ musician, the violinist Owen Pallett, who builds up his songs from an initial tape loop - it’s a much more explicit putting-together of ‘melody’ (which I now see I have to write in scare quotes!) than you usually hear in pop songs. Procedurally, this also seems to blur some popular-classical boundaries: Isn’t this rather similar to what some contemporary classical electronic musicians do - I’ve heard classical recorder players use tape loops in this way? Is there room in such overlapping circumstances for spats over who has a melody and who has a ‘line’?

jan

by: kae

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 04:27:45 +0000

I have always had especially great fun singing Rufus’s songs, but they are particularly difficult to sing along to. In the spectrum of pop music, I would place them at the end, opposite to the japanese ditties that are especially designed for karaoke. The first song of Rufus I fell for was “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk”. There’s this line that’s slightly different from the others, the “and then there’s those other things…” : I worked so hard figuring out how to sing that part, it’s ridiculous. But then, there’s great fun to think about those songs as great tasks or puzzles, especially when the voice range doesn’t match or there’s a long “vibrate” to hold.

by: Rhapsody

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 16:13:59 +0000

Music does seem to engage various parts of the brain where memories are stored. It must be that there is a bona fide physiology to listening to music that is able to combine the senses with memory details and store them with particular melodies. I’ve often had the experience of listening to a song that brings back memories–sight, sounds, scents and events. Perhaps this is true of art in general. Looking at paintings or watching a ballet has a similar effect. Even a predilection for certain poems or novels seems tied to the particular experiences that are tapped in each individual reader as he/she reads. We filter our responses to art through a sifter of our unique experiences and memories.

Listening to new music that is just similar to a favorite piece can sometimes dredge up past memories so that the “new” song is stored “along side” the old one.

I remember that a doctor friend of mine once told me that the one emotion that is not stored for recall or tied to a particular memory or experience is pain. I suppose that is why moms can remember the experience of giving birth without having the urge to slap their children.