
How Does Music Speak?
Speech is made clear by phrasing and articulation.
Clauses and sentences form structures which are separated by pauses and stresses. In written text, this is done by punctuation.
In music, phrases and pairs of phrases correspond to clauses and sentences, and phrasing is the structuring of these elements.
In vocal music this usually coincides with the punctuated structure of the text.
Similarly, instrumental music has to imitate the natural phrasing and breathing of a song.
To articulate is to form phonemes in such a way as to produce as comprehensible and clear speech as possible.
Speech consists of syllables and words, which are to be pronounced heavily when important, and lightly when less so.
The most powerful stress is often at the beginning of a chapter and a clause, whereas other strong or weak accents appear elsewhere depending on the language.
In a written text the same structures are achieved by other means.
Musical phrases consist of notes forming different figures. By accentuating, tying together or setting apart, these small structures gain clarity and profile.
Of course, I’m not going to leave you after so few. Here’s my trademark digression /development :
I have to add a few important lines about aspects I could spend the rest of my life addressing…
That’s (the few I wrote to expose the basics) a lot of intricacies enough for music with only one melodic line. Polyphony is something else entirely, yet it obeys the same principles for each melodic line.
I could even develop with homophonic and homorhythmic, isochronal music.
Be it monodic or polyphonic, Baroque Music is and remains structured on what a speech is composed of.
What’s fundamentally different is the “geometry” of music. Again, a reminder of Ancient Greece.
It can be only horizontal, only vertical, but most of the time, the heart of music is at the intersection of its horizontal (speech-like) and vertical (superimposition, generating harmony) lines.
I won’t start with the concept of “diagonal music”. It’s beyond intricacy. Only composers are using it on a daily basis, too.
No matter how you look at it, how you feel it and which emotions arise, any speech has also more than one dimension.
Also, if you ever wondered if a broken arpeggio has an harmonic or rhythmic function… you’re not alone. I know it well: musicologists are the first to wonder.
It’s once again contextual.
Depending on the “topic in question”, the tonality, the tempo, the time signature… the balance of both aspects (harmony and rhythm) will be different.
I hope you found something useful and meaningful in this (unusually) short story. I kept it short on purpose. I want to know if a reader has anything like more than three seconds of an attention span, and if stories estimated to be a quick read are any different than long ones.
I’ll publish some more stories… but days are counted until I move on.
Medium is a great place to start, but once you reach the point I’ve reached, you want to do it your way because you feel stuck and you know that you’ll end up regretting and regressing.
Let me clarify. I know it’s hard to understand what I mean. You don’t know about my life, my background and so on.
To be truly honest… I hated writing this story the way I did. Fighting my own demons is definitely not my thing.
Demons. Yes.
Like having spent my entire life since I first started to write, then later to write about music only, and every possible aspect of it… just to have my work reduced to only a few lines so everyone can grok what I write about.
I’m not elitist, but there’s a limit to “making knowledge accessible”. It’s the lower limit.
I’m accustomed to write at the very least 70 pages —the shortest I ever wrote — worth of serious albeit not academic scientific studies of my own!
Having to settle for less and severing my work is really a pain. Either simplifying until it becomes dirt to me and feeling like shit… or going my own way, caring nothing about the format and the guidelines.
What is here on Medium will stay here, but days are counted… until everything can finally breathe on my own website.
I’ll keep you tuned.
