The most beautiful melody in the world

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This article was published 04/08/2013 (4438 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OK, I’m not actually proposing to name the most beautiful melody in the world — I’m not that arrogant or that dumb. For now, I want to offer a small tour of some of the most beautiful and enduring melodies I happen to know and talk about what makes them that way. Will we thereby find the eternal secret of great melody? Well, no. But it’s one of those questions that can get you somewhere if you don’t take it too seriously.

First, naturally, we have to define what a melody is. It’s… oh jeez. All right, let’s turn to the authoritative Grove Dictionary of Music: “Melody, defined as pitched sounds arranged in musical time in accordance with given cultural conventions and constraints, represents a universal human phenomenon… While the exact causal relationships between melody and language remain to be established, the broad cultural bases of ‘logogenic melody’ are no longer in question.” Um, moving right along…

The venerable Harvard Dictionary of Music is more slippery and maybe for that reason more convincing: “A coherent succession of pitches. Here pitch means a stretch of sound whose frequency is clear and stable… succession means that several pitches occur; and coherent means that the succession of pitches is accepted as belonging together.” In other words, a succession of notes that sounds to you like a tune is a tune. As goofy as that is, I can’t think of anything better, because we’re dealing with an exquisitely subjective and mysterious phenomenon, one universal yet elusive, like love and God and other enigmas. You know it when you hear it – according to how you’ve been conditioned by your culture and experience to hear it.

This means the next person’s idea of a tune may not be yours. We musicians know all about this. Somebody once congratulated Debussy for transcending melody, and he retorted in outrage his music was nothing but melody. Both Beethoven and Brahms were accused of having no melody; so has modern jazz. When I hear some traditional African songs, I enjoy them but can’t figure out how they remember them. The same goes for a good number of pop tunes.

Each culture has its own sense of melody, one that often seems peculiar to the next culture. Some early Japanese tourists in the West had to be carried out of opera performances, they were laughing so hard. Westerners often struggle when listening to traditional Japanese singing, which tends on first acquaintance to sound a bit constipational.

I’m going to focus here on Western melodies. On the whole, rock ‘n’ roll is not a particularly tuneful genre. I’m fond of the Beatles’ Come Together, for example, but its “tune” mostly jogs in place on three notes, with a little flight at the end of the phrase. What makes that song work is its sound, its atmosphere, its distinctive loping rhythm, its surreal words: “Here come old flattop, he come groovin’ up slowly, he got juju eyeball, he one holy roller…” Many classic songs are founded on a catchy rhythm (Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm) or a striking chord progression (All the Things You Are). Dylan’s sublime Subterranean Homesick Blues is a pitchless chant, as is a good deal of rap. Most of the time, symphonic themes are not particularly tuney, because they are made to unfold and develop over a long haul. As we’ll see, though, in classical pieces there are notable exceptions to that rule.

The tunes I mainly want to talk about are ones you might whistle in the shower or sing around a campfire: melodies that have a kind of independent there-ness on their own, often memorable and distinctive even without accompaniment. I’ll start with one of my favourite traditional American songs, Wildwood Flower. It was the Bluegrass group Flatt & Scruggs’ theme song, Joan Baez did a fine version, and it was made famous mainly by the Carter Family. Supposedly, folk songs are a spontaneous product of folks, not written by any one person, but that’s partly myth: Like Wildwood Flower, a lot of them were first composed by professionals, then evolved through the generations. Texts and melodies are fluid, new words written for old tunes.

A successful tune needs to be “coherent.” What makes a tune coherent? That, too, is an elusive matter, but there are some things that can be identified: A memorable tune has some consistent motifs and a satisfying shape. The most obvious motif in Wildwood Flower is rhythmic: the dum dee-dee dum dee-dee that starts at the beginning and goes throughout. The main melodic motif is a three-note bit of descending or ascending scale that happens some dozen times in the tune, starting with its first three notes. As to the shape, this one has mostly the stepwise rise and fall of typical folk songs; it rises quickly to the fifth degree of the scale and drifts back down. For me, the glory of the tune is what happens in the middle: an exhilarating leap up to its highest note that in every verse nicely underlines the words at that point (“and the myrtle so bright”). Then it sinks back down in an echo of the beginning.

We find the same kind of thing in what may be the oldest extant hit song in the West, the 16th-century Greensleeves. There’s an old legend this was written by King Henry VIII for Anne Boleyn. It wasn’t. The subject may be a prostitute, or not. The author is perhaps one Richard Jones, and in its first year (1580) there were half a dozen versions in print. Shakespeare mentions it in The Merry Wives of Windsor. More recent incarnations have included the sighing orchestral variations by Ralph Vaughan Williams and the melody of Jacques Brel’s acid Amsterdam. In the 1950s, a straightforward version was a hit single alongside Elvis songs.

The engine of Greensleeves is the steady lilting rhythm in the style of the time’s romanesca. It’s got an A idea of two lines and a B idea likewise. The main melodic motifs are a four-note bit of scale that goes up and down throughout and three notes descending a chord. The tune has an especially elegant, rolling contour, highlighted by the passionate and climactic B idea (“Greensleeves was all my joy”) that starts on the melody’s highest note.

So there’s a tune that has been embraced by millions for more than 400 years and counting.

Being a tunesmith, a crafter of catchy melodies, is a distinctive and rare kind of musical talent.

A good tune happens to you; you can refine it, but in the end it can’t be created by work or by will. Schubert and Mozart had the gift in spades, Beethoven less so, and there was not much Beethoven could do about it (though he wrote his share of splendid tunes). This also reveals you don’t have to be a tunesmith to be a great classical composer. Lots of Beethoven does perfectly well without striking themes, and sometimes in his instrumental music Schubert’s pretty, self-contained tunes get in the way of the ongoing musical dialogue.

The myriad glories of J.S. Bach’s music tend to obscure what a terrific tunesmith he was. He could come up with both grand themes and little tunes that sound artless but aren’t.

For an example of the latter, there’s his all too famous but still lovely Sheep May Safely Graze, in which he begins with a lilting pastoral melody of his own, moves to a traditional Lutheran hymn, then combines the two in effortless counterpoint. Bach’s epic St. Matthew Passion paints the death of Christ as a universal story of love, loss and grieving. What gives an aria, “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein,” about love and loss from that passion a place in my heart is a warmth and tenderness in the melody that is as secular as sacred, and its heart-tugging hook on the line Ich will Jesum selbst begraben – “I will myself bury Jesus.”

In American popular music, the superstar of the middle decades of the last century was George Gershwin, who wrote his first hit, Swanee, in about 10 minutes at age 20, while riding a bus (or so he claimed). That song paid the rent for the rest of his life. He went on to a long row of tremendous songs, and meanwhile taught himself to be a symphonic composer as well.

In his short life, the climax of that development was Porgy and Bess, the greatest American opera and a timeless example of how to make a successful crossover, in this case between opera and Broadway. Its most famous aria is, of course, Summertime, but the one that moves me most in this tale of a crippled beggar and his drug-addicted lover is Bess, You Is My Woman Now, which is equally a true operatic aria at the service of the story and a moving and unforgettable melody on its own. In both words and music, it manages to bring together powerful feeling and incipient heartbreak — it’s a tragic love song.

Finally we arrive at modern pop music. Here we run into my feeling that on the whole, our pop tunes, including ones I happen to like, are not particularly tuney. A semi-exception to that pattern are some songs of the Beatles — I suspect the ones Paul McCartney was mainly responsible for. One of the few examples in the last half-century of a popular standard in the traditional sense is McCartney’s Yesterday. Here’s a tuney tune par excellence. McCartney’s own original version is interestingly straight-ahead and a bit brisk in tempo, given its theme of lost love. George Martin’s string-quartet arrangement gives it elegant support.

But what about my title, the most beautiful melody in the world? Actually, I have a definition of that vaporous entity: The most beautiful melody in the world is the one that at the moment you can’t get out of your head. Not in the sense of worming annoyingly into your mind, but rather of somehow capturing something important and moving to you in particular, which may or may not be something that moves the masses. For me, off and on for some time, it’s been a relatively obscure Yiddish song from 1911: Mayn rue Plats, which I find passionately, sadly, hauntingly beautiful. From the first time I heard it, I was transfixed. Like a haunting face, like love, that’s what a great melody can do for you.

 

– Slate

 

Swafford is a composer and writer. His books include Johannes Brahms: A Biography and Charles Ives: A Life With Music.