Monday, October 15, 2018

Perfect Cadence

Just a few days ago, I realized something about my simple mind. It had been bubbling up for a few months, but suddenly it's crystallized:

Start your melody with the dominant tone on the upbeat, then down on the tonic ("5-1"), and I will love your melody and it will stick in my mind forever. Apparently.

I am a lifelong piano player, but I've only recently really started to get acquainted with the general classical piano repertoire. So while I've been playing everything by Erik Satie since I was a teenager, only in the last 5-6 years have I started to play a lot of Chopin, Scriabin, Grieg, etc. Only a 2-3 years ago did I first start to learn Chopin's etudes.

One of the etudes I played for a while, maybe the most beautiful one and one of the most famous, is the Op.10 no.3 in E-major. It starts on the 5, then to the 1:



That is a nice melody! Happy but a little sad, reflective, contemplative. Then this summer, I start looking for Schumann pieces to play, and of course I rediscover his "Traumerei" in F:

Schumann, Robert: Träumerei (Reverie) - Piano

Very nice melody, easy to play, similar mood, meaning (in my mind) to the Chopin etude. And it also starts from the 5 to the 1. I notice this and think, how neat, two melodies I like that start the same way - and just a half-tone apart!

Then this summer, I start listening to Grieg's lyric pieces, and I get the book and they're all fun to play, mostly not too difficult. One of my favorites is one of the simplest, the "Watchman's song":
Image result for grieg watchman's song
Now you see it again, again in E major: 5-1 to start the melody. And again, similar mood. Now I start to realize something funny is going on. I'm not just cherry-picking here: these are three of my favorite piano pieces to play or hum to myself in the hallways in the last year or so. I also realize that my favorite Grieg melody, "Solveig's Song" from Peer Gynt, starts the same way (5 up to 1 on the downbeat), though it is in A minor.

Then, well, I forget about it - and last week, not sure why, I'm thinking about it again. My favorite tune from Satie's Gnossienes: no 5, in G major.

Image result for gnossienne no 5

Not just the first two notes - all four of these pieces (Chopin, Schumann, Grieg, Satie) have the same first three notes, and they're all in nearby keys (Emaj, Fmaj, Emaj, Gmaj).

Once I noticed the Gnossienne, I start finding the pattern everywhere. First, many other great classical melodies, though mostly in minor keys (the major ones apparently stand out to me), and I realize I can just sit and they're so easy to find in my brain:

Beethoven's "Marmotte"; Smetana's "Moldau"; Grieg's "Solveig's song"; Faure's Sicilienne, Scriabin's Prelude 14 (which I learned 10 years ago, one of the first of his that I learned); the 'song without words' from Holst's folk song Suite, which was always my favorite part of that tune when the band played it in high school. Those are all in minor keys, but notice this too: whereas the major key ones all go down from the tonic (to the major seven, each one), the minor key tunes all go up! And except for the Sicilienne, they all go up to the 2 (it goes up to the 3).

And what do you think has always been my favorite leitmotif from Star Wars? The "Force Theme", in C minor, which goes up from the tonic to the 2!

Then we can do folk songs and pop songs; I would have immediately have listed my childhood favorites as O Shenandoah (Major, but goes up from the tonic) and "My Grandfather's Clock" (Major, goes down to the 7 like the four initial examples). Everyone's favorite 'Simple Gifts' (the Shaker hymn used by Aaron Copland). My favorite Simon Garfunkel song: El Condor Pasa (Minor, down to the seven from the tonic); a pretty good Queen song, though not my favorite, is "Who wants to live forever", in a minor key going up to the 2 from the tonic.

My two favorite Tom Waits tunes: "Downtown train" (outside another yellow moon) and "If I have to go", though those are so similar it might be that the former is a rewrite of the latter. And what Mozart melody, that I would always have said was his most beautiful, starts in exactly the same way (same first 4 notes) as those Tom Waits melodies?

It doesn't start on the upbeat, but it's the theme from the second movement of his clarinet concerto:



\new Score {
  \new Staff = "clarinet" {
    \transpose c a
    \relative c' {
      \set Staff.midiInstrument = #"clarinet"
      \clef treble
      \key f \major
      \time 3/4
      \tempo "Adagio"
      \set Score.tempoHideNote = ##t
      \tempo 4 = 60

      c4( f4. a8) | a8( g) f4 r | c4.( f8 a c) | c8( bes) a4 r |
    }
  }
}

***

Now, starting your melody by going from the dominant to the tonic doesn't guarantee I'll love it. I quickly thought of two examples I don't really care for - just two, while it was so easy to think of the two-dozen beloved ones above: I don't enjoy Schumann's "The Happy Farmer", maybe because my mother's a piano teacher and I've heard it way, way, way too many times in my childhood. And Wagner's wedding march ("Treulich geführt") is just clichéd to death. But then, speaking of Wagner, there is main theme of the Tannhauser overture, which I remember listening to over and over again, for its inspirational feeling, back 2-3 years ago. Easily my favorite Wagner theme, though I had not thought of it in a while (and I have never listened to the actual opera, so I don't know the source of the theme - wikipedia says it's from the "Pilgrim's Chorus").

In sum it seems that there is a key in my brain, shaped like "5-1", and it lets you right into my eternal musical memory.