dumbfoundry

A number of years ago I received a phone call from a fellow who had written a musical – the book to a musical, that is. He was looking for a composer to write the music. I’m afraid he was something of a crank – the kind of person who starts off by hectoring you on the qualities he doesn’t want in his musician. His show would be set in the 1890s, he said, and he wanted to be sure that any music I wrote would show no sign of the awful influence of jazz, blues, or rock and roll. I don’t remember just how I put him off, but his comments made me think about how difficult it is to imagine writing music without the influence of jazz, blues, or rock and roll – music, in short, before Western music had been colonized by Africa. [...]

The European polyphony which reached its apex in the music of J. S. Bach involves a complex set of rules and procedures to make music in which several melodic lines maintain their independence from one another while still agreeing, in the moments when they line up, on coherent progressions of harmonies. African polyphony requires that different rhythmic layers should maintain their independence, should be heard as distinct, and yet in combination should create a rhythmic whole greater than its parts. A useful term for this phenomenon might be the one with which Salvatore Mannuzzu titled his 1995 novel, Il terzo suono, by which he refers to a third sound which appears unbidden from the superimposition of two other sounds. The “third sound” is evident in even the most basic forms of rhythmic polyphony derived from African music. The most basic example I can think of is Queen’s “We Will Rock You”. Here, the drumbeat layer stresses the backbeat – beats two and four – while the melodic stress is in counterpoint to it, on beats one and three. To appreciate the effectiveness of the third sound, imagine its absence: sing a new melody that places its emphasis with – not against – the backbeat: We WILL, we WILL, rock YOU. [...]

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Friday, August 06, 2004 at 8:59 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.