Trollheart: what melody means to me.
That old bugbear has reared its head again, and so I thought that, rather like last year, when I professed that I could not consider Grindcore as music (though I may investigate it and throw myself headlong into the genre next year, stay tuned) and had to explain to Janszoon how this could be, I find myself having to explain and justify my use of the word itself. This is not in direct response to Frownland, or anyone else, nor invitation to a fight, but my attempt to conclusively explain what I mean when I write about melody.
While the Oxford English Dictionary defines melody as
1. A sequence of single notes that is musically satisfying; a tune:
he picked out an intricate melody on his guitar
1.1[MASS NOUN] The aspect of musical composition concerned with the arrangement of single notes to form a satisfying sequence:
her great gift was for melody
1.2 The principal part in harmonized music:
we have the melody and bass of a song composed by Strozzi
1.3[MASS NOUN] Sweet music; tunefulness
I have my own personal definition. We’ll get into how that can be so in a short while, but for the moment let’s just look at the above. Pick out several words that perhaps support my definition: “A satisfying sequence”. “Tunefulness”. “Musically satisfying.”
Now, some people would stick to the rigid definition that any sequence of sounds, not notes, is melody, and to a great extent yes, that is true. You can hear melody in rain falling, a river flowing, even the breathing of your loved one as they lie beside you. There are plenty of mundane, everyday objects that can be said to make a certain approximation of melody. The fridge, the dishwasher, my pet cats, the doorbell. Any sounds in a sequence can essentially be said to be melody of sorts.
However, when
I think of melody, I think of music I can hum, a structured tune, something I enjoy listening to or can at least pick out the notes and chords in. Melody, though it is defined, is open to a certain amount of interpretation. How? Well because a word like “disabled” certainly could mean two very different things to two people, as could “sacrifice” or even “good weather”. Just because something is defined a certain way in the dictionary is not necessarily the only way it can be looked at. Take the word “pet”, for instance. Pet means any animal you keep as a domesticated companion, or something. But people who do not like pets might define them as a nuisance, a waste of time, a strain on the wallet. Both interpretations can be said to be true. Much of what we perceive around us is open very much to our own idea of what those things are.
So with melody. Everyone hears music a different way. What I call a beautiful keyboard passage might be interpreted as pointless noodling by another person, and what they consider a crushing brutal guitar groove might seem as noise to me. Both are right: it’s however they’re interpreted by different people that matters. If it didn’t, then everyone would like Perry Como AND Darkthrone: why wouldn’t they? They’re both music. One person however will find the former boring and the latter bitchin’, while for another Darkthrone would be noise and Como would be soothing. It is, again, all in the interpretation.
The only way I was able to get Janszoon to, I think, accept or understand what I was saying about not finding or calling Grindcore music was to use the example of two men talking about sports. “Do you play sports?” says one, to which the other replies “Oh yes, I’m a keen golfer.” The first one sneers and says “Golf? That’s not sport! Walking around on a field? Now rugby:
that’s sport!” The first guy is not in any way attempting to say that golf is not
sport, as it clearly is, but is giving his opinion that to him, it is not what
he considers sport. Nobody is denying the immutable fact that golf
is a sport.
So it was with Grindcore. I explained to Jansz that it wasn’t that I was saying it didn’t fit the dictionary definition of music, but that
I did not consider it such, because it did not sound like it to me. The “to me” is very important of course; this is only my opinion.
And so, melody is something I expect to be tuneful or at least something I can follow, something that shows me a pattern in the music. If I don’t hear that, I consider the music not to have any melody. It’s probably helpful to always subconsciously add “that I can see/hear” to any comments I make about melody, because that’s what I mean: I can discern nothing that shows itself to me to be melody, nothing that satisfies my own, admittedly specialised, idea of what melody is.
I don’t wish to debate this to death, and as I say it’s not aimed specifically at anyone, but it comes up so often I felt the time was right to nail it down. Someone can tell me “You’re crazy man:
Sixteen Photocopiers Running While A Kettle Boils has melody!” and I would not deny it, not at all. It’s just that
I can’t hear it, can't make it out, and so to me, and perhaps
only to me, it has none. Play a death metal album to anyone not into that scene and they’ll tell you it’s just noise. It isn’t (not always anyway) but to them it is, and you will do well to change their opinion. Boring, loud, melodious, confused, wandering, freeform, angry, depressing: these are all terms that can be used to describe certain music, as heard by one person, whereas another will hear something totally different. As I say, it’s all down to personal interpretation.
I hope that finally explains my position with regard to melody.